The Power of Solitude, as Told by a Solo Banana
A celebration of the power of alone.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
Being alone is not the same as being lonely. But one’s enjoyment of being alone comes with oversized societal baggage. Don’t even try arguing the benefits, because those delicious me-time bags do not comply with the Airline of Life’s weight limits. You will be charged for every second of your all-alone, by-yourself-and-loving-it ways, and it will not be fair. It will not be just. The solitude price gouge is just how the market works.
To enjoy the pleasure of your own company is a sin. A defect of character. You might as well be saying: “I am a broken piece of crockery poorly glued, but I still hold tea. Tea that only I can drink.” That’s not true, of course, but that’s the assumption. Truth be told, there’s pure power in the skill of not imploding when you are all alone, but that power is horribly misunderstood and the benefits poorly marketed. Alone is a loaded gun of a word and it needs a good rebranding, because what was I saying before? Oh, I know. Being alone isn’t the same as being lonely.
She felt so alone, she died alone, she’s going it alone—these are simply dark lace emotions stitched to solitude’s glorious blanket by a culture of fear. No one wants to die alone, yet everybody does. Going it alone breaks away from the ‘must tackle adventures with other people’ norm in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable. Because being alone is dreadful, right? A black-hearted whirlpool in which you will thrash around and drown. Alone! Alone! Alone! It is a social death sentence, isn’t it?
No. The ability to enjoy the aloneness of you is absolute fire. It crackles and spits and is pure life combustion. But if you have that fire in you it also signals something terrible—you must like yourself. And that’s what frightens people. We’re not supposed to like ourselves in this world and there you are flaunting it and turning that mirror back on our self-hating faces. We’re not supposed to like doing things alone, we’re supposed to fall back and stick with the group. You can be lonely in a group by the way. “Well, choose a better group!” you say, and that’s a fair point. But the choice is not always yours and brings me back to this: if you like your own company you will always have a friend.
The point.
The most hoppin’, action-packed place on earth is your own mind. Your mind is a playground filled with thoughts, only you are each thought and each thought is you. It’s a crowd, man. A scene. There’s young you, old you, bad you, good you. *closes eyes* There’s Mean Janeen, Clumsy Janeen, Self-Doubt Janeen. Marble-up-the-nose Janeen, Hater Janeen, Daydreamer Janeen, Hurt Janeen, Sky is Falling Janeen, Rule Follower Janeen. Lying Janeen, Crying Janeen, You’re No Good Janeen Janeen. Etc. Etc. So many Janeens on this playground, all talking at once. What a din.
Breathe. Seek. Be still. One by one they dissolve until there she is—the Janeen I have learned to like (dare I say, love) stands before me. This Janeen is the one who enjoys getting older, who knows what she likes, who has crazy ideas, and who accepts she has problems of interaction and perception but works on them. We are alone now, this thought Janeen and I, but we are not lonely. We are just together. We ride bikes for hours, together. We work and create shit, together. We camp on signal-free mountains, together. We are alone, together.
You don’t always need the compression sock of society around your body to make you feel secure1. This doesn’t mean you don’t like people. This doesn’t mean you don’t like the company of others, or being touched, or being part of something. It simply means that you’ve found a way to make peace with all the troublesome yous in your head in order to hang out with the best you—the one you like. The sanctity of solitude is finding that version of you. Make friends with THAT person, because sometimes you’ll find yourself alone through no fault of your own (a pandemic lockdown being a prime example), and that’s when enjoying the pleasure of your own company won’t be a sin, it’ll be a blessing.
Being alone is not the same as being lonely. I can’t tell you how to like yourself. It takes time and work and focus and active pursuit. You’ll need to look at all the players on your mind playground and find a way to make peace with the pieces of yourself that you don’t like so you can spend time with the pieces that you do. That app-filled thing in your hand is no substitute for the thing in your head. That app-filled thing in your hand is a portal to pain. A black hole that sucks you into false narratives on someone else’s curated feed. It can be a tool, sure. A salve, a fizzing aspirin in your glass, but it can also make you hate yourself not love, which is the opposite of what I’m talking about. Be cautious. Be vigilant.
In short, find yourself in you.
It’s a fight. Every day you must navigate the war inside your brain to find the peace. Reorganize the players on your playground until you find that one voice that says: “Let’s hang out, together alone.”
Then go play.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
"Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
- Kurt Vonnegut
Via Nitch
This makes me feel things. In my mind, I’m riding a horse in the Alabama Hills on the set of a Western and pretending I’m exotic.
Via me.
A short (9-minute) film. You can read about the project in this 2013 interview with the creator, here >
Via This is Colossal
From the YT description: “A timelapse of the Milky Way that was recorded using an equatorial tracking mount over a period of around 3 hours to show Earth's rotation relative to the Milky Way.”
Via Kottke
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
The weighted blanket of y’all is also sometimes exactly what I need. I am not shunning society. It’s not life balance—not 50/50 this or that—it’s life harmony. Of finding the right ratios. Adjust the percentage of blanket coverage daily and kick it off when it gets too sweaty. And then, Ommmmmm all day e’ry day.