How to Be Alone: The Subtle Art of Learning to Love Yourself

Until you do, you can never fully love others.

I’ve only entertained the thought of killing myself once in my life.

They say that emotional pain registers in the same part of your brain as physical pain.

An emotional trauma, say, massive rejection, feels like you’re literally breaking your leg.

Well, in this little season of my life, it felt like I was being repeatedly stabbed by a rusty syphilis-infested dagger forged from the flames of hell by Satan himself.

I recently published an article about separating from my wife three years ago. I took it hard. This piece is a continuation of those thoughts.

Before your read on, just know that you can get over a situation like this, too, if you just give it a little bit of time.

I still remember the trip I took mere days after I left my ex’s place for good. Went to visit a friend in D.C. to reset. He had to work during some of the days, so I was left to venture into the city alone — something that would be extremely fun to do now because I now know how to enjoy myself alone.

Then, though? I felt crippling loneliness. I don’t actually remember any time in my life where I’ve felt worse, totally broken. I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture and posted pictures of exhibits on social media, pretending like I was having a good time, but the pain I felt was so palpable I literally had trouble reading the captions underneath the exhibits. My loneliness consumed 100 percent of my thoughts. For a few weeks after my separation, I knew what it meant to be a shell of one’s self.

The Mirage of Identity Many of Us Build

Before this, my life was great, or so I thought. I thought I was “personally developed,” but until my marriage and family disappeared, I didn’t realize how much of my identity and development had nothing to do with … me. Instead of a self-image, I had a mosaic of codependencies I didn’t know existed until they were gone.

I’m not the type who’d ever do this, but I can now see why someone would commit suicide after finding themselves in loneliness for too long. It’s, perhaps, the most debilitating state one can find oneself in.

Loneliness can only occur when you don’t know how to be alone, though. Loneliness presupposes that you need the company, attention, validation, acceptance, and love of anyone other than yourself.

Is it okay to want these things? Sure. I want them. We all do. But to need them and make them a core pillar of your existence sets you up for a huge fall. It certainly did for me.

So the goal isn’t to be alone but to learn how to be alone. I didn’t want to have zero social and love life forever, but not having them for a brief period of time was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Some of the most valuable lessons are the most painful.

I’ve rebuilt my life to an even better position, like those broken vases that are stronger than the original when glued back together. Not better in that being single and living in a new city is better than having a family. I loved having a family.

But now, I can have one and will have one again with the proper sense of self — independent of others first. Being alone forced me to look at my life clearly, be honest with myself, and create an identity that fully belonged to me.

Here’s what I did and what I subsequently learned.

The first day I moved into my new apartment, I cried. Hard. I don’t cry. I’d love to say it was cathartic. Nah, it was just sad. To dig myself out of sadness and apathy, I tried anger. I tried becoming my own drill sergeant, and literally yelled at myself out loud.

“This is your fucking apartment now! Deal with it.”

I walked to my daughter’s new room:

“This is your daughter’s new room. Deal with it! This is where you will raise her!”

I tried to maintain the sergeant’s tone but my voice cracked with sadness and my lip quivered when I said it, tears dribbling out. Shaking. Imploding. Immolating.

That was maybe the second saddest moment to date, after the one where I was about to leave my former home and my three-year-old said, “Where are you going?” I could tell from her tone, that she knew I was leaving.

Anyway, the first few days and weeks were spent in a sort of malaise, really. I published articles from my archives because I couldn’t bring myself to write anything good. I still wrote, but I went through the motions so everything sucked.

The malaise didn’t end until I reached the point of acceptance.

The first step of learning how to be alone is finally accepting it without fighting it. You spend too much of your life imagining your life differently than the way it currently is. In one form, visualization is fine, but in the form of hiding, it only compounds the problem.

The lessons I’ll detail next are most important, but some of the steps I took were:

• Health — I lost 20 pounds. My comfort as a “family” man led to laziness. I figured I could still move my body even if I didn’t really feel like it. Lesson in there. At first, I definitely did it because I wanted to boost my confidence and start dating asap, but it’s since turned into a real exercise in spirituality and wellness.
• Connections — I slowly started connecting with people. I had a few old contacts in town and rekindled relationships with them. I joined local clubs. And then I just started chatting people up and meeting others like a normal human being.
• Purpose — Once I felt back to normal, I went on an absolute tear with my writing. I poured my energy and spare time via that solitude into my craft.

My first instinct was to rush and fill the void, but instead, I chose to work on myself. It’s not as if I’m “cured” or anything like that, but now I’m focusing on becoming a whole person, irrespective of how many people are in my life — both in-person and digital.

I learned many lessons.

The Co-Dependency Trap

When you develop too many co-dependencies, you lose boundaries. Having boundaries is both better for you and the people you interact with. See, people don’t want to walk all over you, but if you create a dynamic that allows for it, most people can’t help themselves. It’s human nature.

This applies to men, women, and people of all genders. The partner without boundaries will sabotage both themselves and the relationship. Two partners without boundaries equal an absolute mess of comingled pain.

I’d let an already bad relationship devolve into rubble because I was afraid to be alone. Since I was afraid to be alone, I didn’t set any boundaries, which just worsened the problem.

When you don’t set boundaries and you’re afraid to be alone, you become needy. When you’re needy, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you need something, the more it eludes you.

The solution to the problem isn’t to become cold and never let people into your life. It’s to let them in your life with boundaries, with self-respect, with conditions.

People stay in bad relationships — romantic, friend, family, and business — because they feel they owe something to the entity of the relationship. Good relationships have a clear set of lines that, if crossed, will end the relationship. This isn’t about being cold. It’s about having self-respect. If you create a situation where nothing the people in your life can do would cause you to leave, you’re a doormat. And you will get walked over.

Again, this is good for everyone involved. Secretly, people want boundaries. They want to know they don’t have dominion over your identity.

So now, I don’t have this checklist of rules and hoops to jump through, per se, but I’m not going to let sunk costs — time investments — dictate whether or not I’m willing to stay in a relationship or not.

And when boundaries are crossed, I’ll address them right away. Most people don’t provide enough warnings to others. It’s okay to tell someone that what they’re doing isn’t cool, and if they continue to do it you’ll walk. Doing that early and often creates the type of relationships that are better for everyone involved.

Do You Know Yourself, Really?

Often, you’re a mystery to yourself. You don’t really know what you like, what you want, who you are, where you want to be, etc because you don’t know how to be alone and create a life of your own first.

You can’t know what you want until it’s independent of what other people want. This doesn’t mean you don’t take others into consideration, but rather that you don’t depend on others for your thinking.

Had I built an independent identity of my own, then got into a relationship, then built a family, I’d have boundaries, healthy expectations, and real bonds. Instead, I rested a pillar of my ego on the idea of being “a family man” ….not a man who has a family. Did you catch that?

Think of how many of your beliefs, tastes, desires, goals, and dreams have almost everything to do with what other people want and almost nothing to do with what you want.

When you learn how to be alone, you become the center of your universe. People can orbit around you if they want, but if they don’t it’s fine. This, again, doesn’t mean becoming egotistical and having unrealistic standards, but when you figure out who you actually are, you’ll know who vibes with you and who doesn’t. They’ll know, too. And if they don’t, you’ll make it clear to them.

I took this time to…don’t barf… “find myself.”

Through alone time, research, experience, etc, I developed some new values, core beliefs, and things I’d be willing to accept in my life going forward. I feel like I can actually love now because “real love is detached.” Because I’m okay on my own. Because I can not only tolerate being alone but thrive doing so. I can now have real relationships without those insidious mental strings of codependency.

When you’re uncompromising about the principles you live by, that’s when you’ll attract everything you want into your life, including the right people.

The Law of Attraction: People Edition

I’ve connected with tons of people over the years, both on and offline. Now, I interact with people in a more sincere way.

Since I want people to be in my life, but don’t need them to be (as much, again I’m not cured) I feel like I can actually see and accept people for who they really are.

See, when you need people to be in your life, you distort who they are in your mind. You idealize them, put them on a pedestal, and ignore flaws and red flags — both in yourself and other people. That’s important. Maybe they’re not the right person to be in your life, but also maybe you’re the one who isn’t right on their own yet. It’s okay to admit that and work on it.

When you come from a core of being okay with yourself, people not only notice it, but they treat you better. People don’t want to be put on a pedestal. So when you do it, you’re making them do something that’s incongruent with what they want, they resent you for it, and either unconsciously or consciously punish you for it.

Learn how to be alone. Learn how to understand that you’re good enough just as you are. Spend time alone.

All of this…this personal journey thing. It all leads back to the self. Everything does.

We chase what’s out there, not realizing we already have everything we need.

Your default state is joy with yourself at all times, like a child lost in the moment, unaware that there even is a world beyond their own perception. It’s no coincidence that kids are magnets. They’re going to play with that little piece of string whether you like it or not, whether you care or not, whether you approve or not.

Maybe try being like this on for size. See what happens.

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