Solitude: Can You Hear Your Inner Voice?

When it comes to my true self, there is too much fog for me to see through. But if one thing can be said for certain, it's this: I love being alone.

The reason is simple. In that quiet freedom, I can hear the voice at the bottom of my heart without straining for it.

I have a certain degree of social anxiety.

For as long as I can remember, being in a noisy crowd has made me uncomfortable. The classic scene, in my memory, is paying New Year's visits: always clamorous, always loud, and always some adult stranded at the edge of the conversation who decides to strike one up with me — the kid who wasn't in any conversation to begin with.

Where these adults find the courage, I'll never know. They don't know you at all, yet the first thing out of their mouths is what you scored on your final exams. It never once occurs to them that they might be interrupting a child deeply absorbed — in spacing out, or in a game. In scenes like these I was never at ease. Even mid-game, mid-daydream, part of me was always bracing: was I about to be made to perform, one second from now, in front of yet another adult I didn't know? Dread, on a loop.

Groups of four or five are slightly better. At that scale, you're usually with people you more or less know — at least one of them. But even this has its nerve-racking moments. There's always some kind soul in charge of keeping the mood alive who cues me now and then, worried about neglecting the quiet ones, forever tugging me back from wherever my mind has wandered off outside the topic.

Stack one more scene on top of those two and you have the most terrifying of all: I answer someone's question carefully and sincerely, and they begin by knocking my answer down — then reach for their own life experience to say whatever it was they wanted to say anyway. An absolute nightmare. Sometimes I'd even catch myself following along, disowning my own answer right there with them, without ever really thinking it through.

For me, two people is the right size for socializing. At the very least, I get to choose who the other person is. I can hear every sentence of theirs clearly, and they hear clearly what I'm trying to say. We can clown around, or talk in earnest — even falling silent is allowed. The company of one other person rarely carries much pressure, and sometimes it stretches me further than I could stretch alone.

Still, I find that being by myself is usually the best of all. With someone beside me, I can't help but attend to their voice, and my own thoughts inevitably get crowded out at times. When there's no one around but me, the self's voice grows a little louder. I know exactly what I'm thinking and feeling; I can sink as deep as I like into my own fantasies and emotions; I can hold a conversation with myself.

Every person is an individual, physiologically and psychologically. To expect someone else to care about me more than I do, or to understand me better than I do, defies logic. I rarely hope for others to understand me — much of the time I can't even make sense of myself. Solitude gives me small openings to try: time to examine the patterns I run on, room to explore my own edges and inclinations.

The first long stretches of solitude were hard to adjust to. I went in expecting self-discipline; the truth turned out to be that I was lazier than I had ever imagined, and the disappointment piled up accordingly.

Expectation and disappointment alike become friction against getting anything done. Unrealistic expectations made me desperate to get things right in a single try — which naturally produced garbage even I couldn't stand the sight of; and then the dissatisfaction and disappointment with myself tied my hands, leaving me afraid to try again.

People are quick to take the credit when everything goes smoothly, and quick to run themselves down when nothing does. But the mind's self-righting machinery is a marvelous thing: once self-denial and self-deprecation sink to a certain depth, reality begins to do its work. I knew that, at the very least, I had done some things; that at the very least two or three people cared about me sincerely. These were facts. If I couldn't pull off anything meaningful right away, then I would start with the trivial. When you spend long hours with yourself, not being sick of your own company is at least a baseline requirement.

Admitting that I'm simply not that good has taken a real weight off me, and given me something precious: an even keel about doing things. Even with pursuits begun purely for interest's sake, I used to tense up over results I couldn't predict; now I carry a bit of ballast instead — the quiet confidence that it's fine even if it turns out badly.

And here is the strangest thing about solitude: it hasn't made me more socially anxious. If anything, it has made me more curious about other people. Whenever some small thing happens, or I finish a book, I find myself wondering how someone else would feel about the very same thing. To discover and savor your own feelings — that is the joy of solitude; and when a feeling at the bottom of your heart turns out to have been put into words by someone else, that is the joy of resonance.

I used to agonize over never quite fitting into groups. Now I know: simply stay away from the groups that make you agonize. To belong somewhere is a fine thing, of course — but doing things I find boring for the sake of fitting in has never made me happy. Certainly not happier than my own company does.

If I happen upon friends and circles that suit my heart, wonderful. And if I don't, time alone is perfectly good too. After all, solitude is where I get my energy back — and I've built up quite a collection of little games to play with myself by now, haven't I?