Solitude is blessed and alone is okay

First this beautiful beautiful thing that you should most definitely watch right away, sent to me by my sister because I wrote her a letter from a coffee shop where I said I had escaped my husband and my daughter and my dog and was enjoying the salacious thrill of walking alone, unencumbered. Savouring it like a small stolen thrill I wasn’t meant to have. I was a shoplifter, stealing my own time behind their backs.

I used to hate being alone, I used to dread it. Now I crave it,

 

 

I loved this. Thank you, Mawney,

*****

The other thought hit me like a truck as I sat watching Enough Said, which was a random selection as I don’t usually watch movies and even more rarely am I able to sit through an entire one. But there I was watching this unlikely fantastic film, and in amidst the beautiful humanity there was a daughter going to college and they had this shot of her walking away up an escalator and she has short curly tousled hair and suddenly I saw Olive, and suddenly I realized that Olive may want to leave home some day and oh my god.

What will I do? I ask honestly. With heartbreak.

So I sat there bawling, as one does, about the inevitable loss of this independent spirit I have unleashed onto the world.

And that’s when Mawney texted me the above video and I took some small solace in thinking that I can take that loss, that gaping hole that Olive will leave if she decides to leave, I can take that absence and create beauty from it. And I will be alone again, and I will be on the other side, trying to steal time, time away from her friends or her school or her travels. I’ll be scrapping for her presence, as I now scrap for my absence away from it all.

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it…

 

…And it doesn’t mean you’re not connected, that communitie’s not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. take silence and respect it. if you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. if your family doesn’t get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it. 

you could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it
If your heart is bleeding make the best of it 
There is heat in freezing, be a testament