When Isolation Turns to Solitude

When you’d rather be alone on a stranded island than be around another mindless person, group, or situation.

When you finally realize your own mind, your own energy, your own time is the most precious thing you have in this world.

When you can see people for who they really are, shed the toxic ones, and cherish the real ones.

When the faint of heart is long gone, and you are okay with that. When you see, it wasn’t a plague that ruined anything other than what was not for you.

When you have truly accepted and appreciate life’s outcomes as blessings.

I didn’t see it at first.

I was waiting to be rescued by a man who promised me a whole new life of love in paradise. Like a lusty, naïve princess of a modern fairytale, I started dreaming of the day of rescue. With that mentality, I despised all that life was by agonizing and mentally withdrawing from everything. I mentally checked out of my career, and I even stopped bonding with my pup, Clyde.

I was either floating on a dream of entirely leaving this life and everything in it, or in complete disgust and frustration of everything that currently was. Dramatizing about the awful plague this, and the terrible virus that; I needed to be rescued.

As a young girl, I was told that being born on a Saturday comes with a special force. With strong enough will, this force can change the course of time and the direction of destiny.

The Reiki Master I visited last week even said I have a special, gentle force protecting me. I have tons of stories of this force that’s changed some situations, but this time the force formed a disease and locked me up at home.

I didn’t see it, and I definitely didn’t accept it. I thought I had finally met my soul mate, and now life was playing a cruel joke. But the force is wiser, of course.

I really needed a leap to the next level of my personal evolution; I thought that’s where I was headed. Instead, I was blindly sidetracked by a distant dream full of lies and emotional exhaustion, to sum it all up. It wasn’t the plague that ruined things.

We blame the plague for everything that’s now broken, politics, healthcare, financial crisis, relationships, but we don’t want to admit that the things were unstable, weak, or broken already.

One night I woke up standing up outside my bedroom surrounded by broken glass. I had completely trashed my apartment, and I didn’t even remember.

It was the new anxiety pills that were helping me deal with life plus some alcohol. Should I blame the pills, though? The alcohol, the plague, my subpar lifestyle, or that guy who was out sipping cocktails with his young female friends while I’m still cleaning up the broken glass 8k miles away.

It was a rude awakening.

If you never trashed your apartment, I can tell you; even though it was probably enormously liberating at the time of the blackout, I seriously don’t recommend it. Broken glass can never be completely swept up, at least not for months and the cuts on your feet take forever to heal.

Some people choose minimalism as a cute weekend project, but some people, maybe just me, need to trash their apartment because they have been staring at all these freaking things they had checked out from but were still seeing. Things from the past or things given, acquired, piled up, stuffed in, or stuck around me that honestly had to go somehow.

Reality can be so harsh.

Especially when you live an artificial fantasy life, avoiding the truth and what life really is, not dealing with issues, running around with mindless people, doing and buying mindless things, and surely when, like me, creating a whole new wishful life to escape the real one.

I had to literally pick up the pieces and make some changes since then. I had to cleanse and detox from everyone and everything that wasn’t adding love and value to my life.

“Evolving Involves Eliminating.” — Erykah Badu

Staying in isolated loneliness is detrimental to your life and Heath. Psychology Today says it can create depression and addiction, as more people eat and drink more. It can also develop cancer and disease. It’s something that has to be dealt with right. We are social creatures; we need to be around other people, but solitude reconnects us with ourselves and humanity.

If we work through those emotions that are making us lonely, “we free ourselves up for problem-solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.”

By definition, Isolation is staying away from others with a disease, or you have the disease. But maybe for us reading this, it’s a force calling for our own transformation, to a self much more powerful and wiser than ever before.

Solitude is the enjoyment of yourself, by yourself.

Solitude is constant gratefulness for all that life is.

Solitude is tough and unconditional love, care, and preservation for yourself.

Now is the time to become true to ourselves. To preserve, evolve, and love ourselves.

That is solitude.

“It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations