Last weekend, I experienced what will be the future of my weekends starting this month: being the only child left to spend the weekends at my parents'.
Before you jump to any conclusion, and in case you didn't know: I'm the youngest out of 3 girls, with the eldest being 10 years older than me. Out of all of them, I was always the one who was fiercely independent. For instance, I was able to walk myself home from kindergarten at the tender age of 5, while the entire world is crumbling around me with massive protests and violence (that I hardly understood the scale of). I was 15 the first time I traveled without my family - and it was for 2 weeks of the summer in Europe. I was 17 when I first live in a boarding house outside of time for college, and then 18 when I lived in an apartment by myself.
Naturally, by the time I was 21 and had to move back home to my parents after college, I felt a bit of unease. I have always, always loved my independence and freedom. By the time I was 24, I lived alone in Chicago and by the time I was 26, after 1 year back in Jakarta, I literally asked my mom for my own place - which resulted in me living in my current apartment with my sister. She, by the way, is getting married in 2 weeks.
I am both excited to get my full freedom back, but also... scared.
While I was home last weekend, I read a book of personal essays by an Indonesian writer and journalist Isyana Artharini titled I am My Own Home. It's a book of... well, personal essays. About the aloneness of living and being alone. About loving the freedom of it, but at the same questioning whether she really enjoys it. I finished the entire book (which was not long) within the day, and couldn't help but noticed how, when I was 24-25 years old living alone in Downtown Chicago, I also was always haunted by the same agony as the writer had felt. A similar feeling where I always felt like I love my independence. But I also feel the silence can be very deafening.
At the risk of romanticizing my time living alone in Chicago, I have spent the last 2 nights thinking of what life was like back then in a more objective view. Back then, I came into the living alone idea of being very excited and happy and not at all scared, only to find that that sensation didn't last very long. Yes, I can do whatever the fuck I want with all the space and time that I have in the privacy of my own apartment. I can even walk around naked and no one will complain. I can eat Flamin' Hot Cheetos for breakfast and literally nobody will tell me that it's wrong.
But now that I'm older, wiser, and more realistic about the technicalities of life and what the world expects out of a woman like me, I get to see it differently. I was also miserable. I was also lonely. I felt empty a lot. I walked around aimlessly on the days I have no reading or assignment, and I wouldn't stop until my hands shivered (in the winter) or my thighs chafe (in the summer). I like eating out, but doing it alone feels stupid; plus American portions are definitely too big for me (also: I was broke AF being a student, right). I hated cooking for myself because (1) I could not make it taste good because of how amateur I was, and (2) I will have so much leftovers and I'm the type who can't be bothered with leftovers. I love sitting alone in a coffee shop, but again, I was broke AF so it was not possible for me to do that too often.
I hated the weekends because that's when the loneliness was magnified. Everyone gets to go to have picnic in the park, drinking rosé on the patio... the list goes on. But I had nobody and no plans whatsoever. I hated the weekends because at least I know people don't really have anything going on other than the regular work/school thing on the weekdays.
That was the very first time I went to see a counselor, who then taught me mindfulness. It was the first time in my life where I realize that it is not wrong when people say Homo sapiens are social creatures. I cannot sustain being on my own for a prolonged period of time. I have to make a human interaction, sharing human experience with someone else. Of course, because that was the first time in my life that has happened to me, and I was young and stupid with so much room for mistake, that's easily what I did: I made mistakes.
I went on so many first dates I got really good at it. I mean, I can be very likeable if you don't know me long or deep enough and I didn't know that until by then. I didn't know that I can be charming and that my life background can be made interesting, depending on how I tell the story. It was also through this serial first dates that I realized how so many people in Chicago were also... alone. Of course, I don't know if they're lonely. I hope they're not. And if back then they were, hopefully by now they're all coupled up, or at least not lonely. But one thing that I really liked about dating in Chicago was how most of the people there are emotionally intelligent. They may not be emotionally available all the time, but in average, their emotional intelligence is above the people I met here. Something about their lives there, or what brought them there... have shaped the way that they access their emotions. This opinion, of course, is limited only to the ones I met and does not extend to every single guy in Chicago. And I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I miss them terribly. I miss the me from that era. At that point in life, I was pretty much inexperienced with love, let alone relationships. I never knew how to flirt or attract someone. So every single dating misadventures (aka. ghosting) that happened back then -- it hit the me, who was already struggling with loneliness, twice harder. I remember I never once questioned if something is wrong me. I knew it wasn't because I was undesirable; it was just the thing that happened when you are dating. It happens to the best of us. But 25 year old me didn't know that -- she was teaching herself to be more resilient, to be more accepting, to grow thick skin, and just move on to the next thing. Because I still remember how my heart ached when somebody gave me a UTI and then ghosted me. When someone told me he's coming over with a sushi platter and then ghosted me. When somebody just disappeared into thin air after he bruised my lips on a night out clubbing.
That year, I realized how it's actually a good idea to manage loneliness; and why governments around the world start to establish Ministry of Loneliness. Humans are not going to sustain themselves being alone. Even if they do, they will make choices that may sound questionable and would someday called a mistake (like I just did two paragraphs ago).
Sometimes when I remember those times, I feel proud of how far I've come today without ever really losing my self-worth. And I was doing all the healing alone. I don't know how I did that, but I know I did. Because I wouldn't be here if I didn't somehow survive that loneliness. God knows where I'll be - maybe just on to another series of mistakes?
