Romanticizing My Solitude

On distraction, presence, and choosing to spend Friday nights with myself

I’ve been practicing active meditation consistently (daily with a few exceptions) for the past three months and can honestly say it has changed my life.

As someone who has historically been prone to worrying (I can be a real nervous nelly sometimes), this practice has helped me elect the present and connect with it deeply.

In my experience, the present moment is where abundance lives. The world is our oyster. We get to make conscious, active choices about our lives and how we want to live them, and damn, if that just isn’t where the magic is.

I’ve had various morning routines for the past six years but I’ve never felt so genuinely thrilled to hop out of bed as I have with SUCO sessions first thing.

I’ve been on a deep SUCO journey for the past three months but it’s been more holistic than simply waking up and shaking. I’ve intentionally let the purpose of it seep into how I live the rest of my life.

The mission behind SUCO sessions is to get people to feel fully.

We are here to remember what it means to feel freely, live fully, and be truly deeply human.

It was only through this practice that I started to notice the ways I’d been distracting myself from the present moment.

You might be thinking: what does any of this have to do with human connection and belonging? Turns out all of it: I tend to distract and numb myself most when I’m feeling lonely.

Which is funny… because I didn’t think I was lonely.

When I think about my loneliest years, I think of my twenties - New York, then DC, plenty of acquaintances and painfully few friends, nobody but my ex to actually tell my life to. I was chronically lonely and fully aware of it, which somehow made it worse. I was social. I put myself out there. But I’d always end up at home with him, downloading every detail of my day - which felt like connection, but probably was actually a symptom of my codependence. I never had to sit with the loneliness, because I always had somewhere to put it.

These days, I don’t consider myself lonely. Comparatively, I’m not. I have great friends, family nearby, a calendar that never has a blank week, group chats I have to mute just to get anything done. I’m no longer that twenty-something with a handful of friends and nobody but her ex to hand her deepest thoughts to. I feel like a critical member of more than one community, and I’m actively building new ones alongside people I love.

And yet, for the year before this practice, as a single woman with significantly more alone time than I’d had in any coupled-up chapter of my life, I was never really choosing to be home alone. I didn’t like being alone, so I avoided it. I’d get on my phone, an hour would disappear, I hadn’t done anything that counted as living, and I’d just postponed whatever it was I was actually supposed to be feeling.

Yes, discomfort is inevitable, and of course we want to numb and distract ourselves from it sometimes. It acts as relief for a brief moment. But distraction and numbing, done on autopilot and unconsciously, are something else. An insidious kind of theft. We rob ourselves of actually feeling. And when we rob ourselves of feeling, we rob ourselves of the lesson in that feeling. We rob ourselves of the experience the universe intended for us to have. We stay stuck.

Which led me to the question: if being alone right now is, in fact, a choice I have made, then why don’t I actually enjoy it?

So I’ve started to romanticize my own solitude instead of just surviving it. I (frequently) put my favorite song on repeat until the neighbors could probably hum it back to me. I turn on the moody lights. I take myself on that artist’s date and spend my time exactly the way my inner child would have requested. I’ve always valued presence, but three months of SUCO changed how I understand it. I thought I already knew how to give someone my full attention. I just never thought to give it to myself.

I’ve also bought myself flowers. Also wearing red for the first time ever.

I don’t think the goal is to fill the alone time. I think it’s to actually be there for it - the same way I’d want to be fully there for a friend, a partner, a good conversation.

So I’m done numbing. It’s time to feel it all: the discomfort, the joy, the random Friday nights that I choose to spend alone.