How did living alone as a student change my life?
Living alone is not easy, especially when it is for the first time that you leave your parents’ house and move to a different city, maybe a country and a new house. I started experiencing this 4 years ago and it was an overwhelming experience.
It changed my life and me from top to bottom. I must say that it seemed a bit challenging at first, however, over the past 4 years I got used to living alone. Being a student could have been an advantage in my story, as it may be much harder to live alone while committing to a 9–5 job.
But I don’t want to do a comparison here, rather I would like to talk about the positive changes it brought to my life. Therefore, I would like to summarize it in 5 points, which, I think, are the main changes that are worth mentioning in this article.
1. Painful freedom is much better than comfortable dependence
The first perk of living alone is freedom. Imagine that you are living with your parents. You may have warm food, clean clothes, and fewer responsibilities in that case. However, it means a lack of freedom. Living with parents means that you are in a small society and most of the time you need to inform them of your plans and actions. Sometimes, these plans may not be approved by parents or others in the house.
To some extent your freedom is limited and it is a fair price for comfortable dependence on others. Nothing is for free, if you get warm food and clean clothes in your house and you are not doing it directly, then there is going to be a price for it. In parents’ case, there are expectations, such as getting a good job or finishing college, and so on.
These ideas could be considered alien in many societies two hundred years ago, however, today, even in very conservative countries young people are expected to live on their own and be free. As the parent-children bond is weakening, so does the dependency on parents or other family members. Therefore, it is better to taste freedom rather than enjoy the perks of your dependent life.
2. Budgeting is king
When you are a teenager or a young person living with your parents, you don’t care about money too much. Because you don’t have to do budgeting for your next month. Once you live alone, you must start tracking your money. It doesn’t matter if you earn it yourself, or you are a student far away from home and receiving money from your parents.
Budgeting is the best skill you are going to pick up from this experience. If you are successful at budgeting in this stage of your life, then you can take that success to the next stages of your life.
Managing money is not only important for not starving to death but it makes you a more organized person with your life in general. Money is an important aspect of life. If you can control your spendings then you can control other simple tasks too. Budgeting may be a great way for collecting savings too.
For example, I was putting a few pennies or pounds behind when I was a student in the UK. With this money, I was buying the books I wanted or going for lunch whenever I was lazy to cook some food.
3. You are becoming a more responsible person
Don’t get me wrong, but most of us were not paying too much attention to the chores in the house or grocery shopping and so on. To sum up, most young people are not interested in taking responsibility for the house. When you start to live independently, you have to do everything on your own. It becomes your sole responsibility.
You may not start to clean your house or go shopping frequently in the beginning. However, after a while, you are forced to do that. Your house will get messy, you will not have enough money to order a takeaway and in the end, you will clean and cook by yourself.
As a result, you will be forming simple habits along the way.
They may look simple and useless, but they help a lot to form a discipline in your life. Disciplined people are successful in their career and life in general, so why not be one.
4. Confidence is the best part of living alone
Since you lived in your parents’ house for a long time, they may have shaped your character a lot. When you are living alone, you form a new character to support you in your new life of yours. Therefore, you start to become more confident in doing your job or problem-solving.
After living abroad for nearly 4 years, I can say that my confidence had a huge boost during these years. I started to solve my problems on my own and my communication with others are much better. Confidence is evident in every part of my life.
Before living abroad, I didn’t know how to stand up for myself or fight for my rights. After these 4 years, I am more of a fighter and I am glad that I became a fighter. In the future, I must stand up for my family and my child. It should always start with the individual.
5. Defining the actual you
This point can be related to independence, however, it is important to mention it separately. I am a firm believer in defining the self, loving the self, and having the ability to live with the self alone. Well, living alone will surely teach you these things.
When I was in the UK, I had a lot of spare time to go for a walk or just think out loud in my room. No one was going to call me crazy for talking to myself. So by thinking out loud and analyzing myself I found my actual identity and embraced it.
This identity helped to free me from many templates set up for me by society: nationality, religion, beliefs, and so on. I just became me and only me. Analyzing most of the concepts, I understood that to be fully independent, I needed to free my mind. With the freedom of mind, came the freedom of action.
I reformed and reshaped my inner self in a way I wanted and today, I am glad that I did. I criticized myself, analyzed myself, found the problems, and solved them. I didn’t stop there and I still check myself on a weekly and monthly basis. I became your therapist and psychologist on the way to freedom.
Living alone may have many more perks but I listed the main ones in my journey. Especially, the last one has a special place in my journey and it helped me a lot to be successful today. I would also say that writing and expressing my opinion on the digital paper was a great way to analyze my identity and discover myself.
I hope you liked this article and hope you can gain some insight from my experience. If you have any opinions, don’t forget to drop them in the comments section, I would love to discuss them furthermore.
