I am not okay on my own

Therapy is expensive so I am once again trauma dumping here

I’m scanning my calendar app for now until the end of the year, almost every weekend is filled with things like:

Tara’s 30th

Pilates with Emmy and Kate

Pub with Jo

Run club/coffee with Anna

And there it is, I don’t know how I missed it. Next weekend. No plans. I already know that a lot of my friends are away that weekend. I no longer have a boyfriend I can cosy up to watch a movie with. I started wracking my brains for people I could message in the least desperate way possible, “hey, what are you up to Friday after the next?? want to do something? please don’t let me be alone with my thoughts! xx” before I stopped and decided to really explore what’s going on.

What exactly is it about a weekend with no plans that has always been so daunting to me? So scary it’s kept me in relationships I knew weren’t right for me. It’s taken me to clubs to I don’t like and outings with friends I’ve outgrown. I dread to imagine how much time and money it has cost me.

I can pinpoint two points in my life I really experienced loneliness:

My first semester of university. I drifted between groups of people I didn’t have much in common with. We’d go on nights out and then eventually replies got further apart and the “friendship” whittled down to awkwardly smiling when we passed each other. I had bad social anxiety which resulted in a complicated relationship with alcohol that took years to resolve.

I thought I was too shy to make friends sober, so I would drink but take it too far which only exacerbated the social anxiety. When I found myself with no plans to go out, I cried in my bed feeling like an absolute failure. Everyone else had seemingly managed to make an army of best friends in their Freshers week, I must be deeply unlikeable and socially inept to have found myself in my student accommodation alone watching people’s stories. My school friends were all having a blast with their new uni mates, they knew how to do university right. Why didn’t I?

If I knew which clothes were cool to wear, maybe those girls would have invited me out with them. If I were prettier, maybe that guy on my course I fancied would have asked me out. If I were braver, I could have been at some society event meeting new people without needing to get belligerently drunk before.

I know now that most of those friend groups rarely lasted after first year and even fewer after graduation, but hindsight is 20/20. The friends I met later that year I have to thank for not being the reason I dropped out, but I’ll always remember the pain of that rejection and the self doubt it embedded in me.

Then there is my first year living in London. I was with my ex at the time but I only had a small handful of friends in London as most of them were either travelling or hadn’t moved down yet. I lived in Clapham, which from Wednesday to Saturday night was always heaving with people spilling out of bars or scattered across the common in the summer. It seemed as if everyone apart from me had huge friendship groups they hung out with all the time and I would walk past from the tube station to my flat feeling inexplicably ashamed.

I was 22 and panicking I wasn’t living my early twenties to the fullest. I should have spent my weekends in smoking areas, random people’s kitchens, going for bottomless brunch with a crowd of girlfriends. My boyfriend at the time required a herculean effort to do anything that required leaving his flat and I got sick of watching Netflix immersed in the stench of weed. I knew long before we ended he wasn’t right for me, but I chose being bored and unhappy with him over being alone.

I downloaded Bumble BFF and went for a drink with a girl who seemed nice but promptly ghosted me after. It was more brutal than dating. I didn’t need her to fancy me or see a future with me, just to want to see me again which was clearly a resounding no.

A few more of my close friends now live in London, I made an intentional effort to make new ones so I’ve been fortunate to not have to deal with that feeling for quite some time now. My recent breakup has kicked up these fears, maybe if I were better, he would have treated me better and I wouldn’t have been forced to leave. I didn’t want to leave or abruptly make myself single.

It’s deeply unpopular to say, but I liked being in a relationship. The weight of someone in the bed with me, taking bites of each other’s food, stupid inside jokes nobody else would find funny, lying on someone’s chest listening to their heartbeat.

But the loneliness of being with someone who doesn’t see you or respect you is infinitely worse than a thousands nights alone in your room scrolling Instagram with a clenched stomach.

These memories hum quietly beneath my fear of empty weekends — the residual belief that solitude means I’ve done something wrong. That I am alone because nobody likes me enough to want to spend their free time with me. I know how grossly self absorbed this is; can I not conceptualise they have other responsibilities and commitments? But for some reason, the absence of others feels like confirmation of my unworthiness.

Believe it or not, I have hobbies outside of socialising, and I often feel behind in them due to lack of free time.

I have just secured a place onto the London marathon. I’ve recently enrolled onto a qualification for the career path I want. I’ve been weight training at the gym for six years. I have a goal to read five more books before the end of the year. I want to work on my book and make much more content for my Substack which I’ve been neglecting.

More solitude would actually be incredibly beneficial for my goals and personal development. An empty weekend should excite me, a rare opportunity to focus on myself, rest and recharge so that when I do see people, they get the best of me. My friends didn’t agree to be a remedy for my fear of being alone, so maybe I should stop treating them like that.

Solitude doesn’t have to just be a relentless pursuit of productivity, I want to go on walks to enjoy the view rather than trying to hit a step count. I want to watch a movie without looking at my phone. I want to read all the essays I save on Substack and never get to. I want to make physical photo albums of my favourite memories with my loved ones which I’ve always wanted to do and never get around to it. I know I could make solitude rather wonderful if I allowed it, so why do I keep stopping myself?