One Bedroom
It’s 7AM on a Sunday and I’m waiting for coffee to set in before going on a run. It’s cloudy and my kitchen is dim — the LED light on the switch of the coffee maker, the pink table lamp I picked up at Goodwill, the grey shading from the window above the sink. The morning news comes through the shared wall, and I am reading a memoir about a girl who’s parents committed suicide — first her father, then her mother. My cat asks for food that I’ve already given him.
For the last year I’ve lived alone, and it’s been the longest period in my life I’ve lived alone. Perhaps that’s delayed development at 28, but between roommates and partners I’ve only enjoyed brief stints of mornings like this — crafted the way I want them with no necessity to regard others. Other people alter your perspective, forcing reflection on corners your own eyes would overlook. Other people make the dust on your desk seem thicker or the clutter around your bed more chaotic and shameful. Without a roommate to judge you or a partner to critique you, “procrastinating” just becomes “existing” and an empty coffee pot can sit in the sink all damn day if it wishes.
It’s remarkable how observation by another can reveal the truth of your existence. Living alone means you are Schrodinger’s Cat — both alive and dead until someone knocks on the door. It allows your inner self to be projected onto detritus — an unmade bed, a mirror splattered with toothpaste. As Emma Cline writes in The Girls:
No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life.
Living alone melts you into a liquid; You fill your container while taking on its shape.
More forceful, however, is the way it reveals your dependent nature — your ugly addiction to validation and socializing. Solitude forces you to render your inner and outer life in colors of your own making without the help of others. In some ways it’s about responsibility — making a promise to yourself to get something done and forcing yourself to do it. In others it’s about consolation — finding solace in yourself that everything is okay.
People with anxiety or PTSD know this feeling. The mind has untold ability to craft fear out of the most minor stimuli — a momentary chest pain, an odd look from an employer, an unexpected call from a private number that leaves no message. The anxious mind will fill any vacuum with dread, trauma, and terror until the eyes see only the sharp teeth of the world while ignoring the wagging tail and the lolling tongue.
A soothing word from another can momentarily put out this kind of fire, and the quest for that validation can be addicting. Obsessive checking and hypervigilance only go so far — you can only take so many photos with your phone of your oven knobs in the “Off” position before your own eyes are flooded with doubt. Anxiety is limitless in its power to warp your perception and can push you towards questioning every detail of your inner and outer world. An outside voice has a way of bringing you back down to something hard and sturdy. Others become a salve for the burns you could not heal yourself.
Of course, roommates and partners don’t particularly relish this role. They themselves might be dueling with a troubled inner life, and living with someone constantly in need of assurances is exhausting, even infuriating. Your space is their space, too, and living with someone with anxiety can be worse than living with a night owl or a smoker.
Being anxious means you are often willing to risk being cloying and needy in the name of finding comfort. You can watch yourself do it, recognize the beleaguered face of another at having once again to confirm you are a safe, good person. But like any addict, the cure for the present is stronger than the fear of the future. Like a shared rent, you give up independence in the name of survival.
This is the goal of therapy — to teach the mind how to not worry simply because it does not need to worry. It’s an ability most people have innately, but trauma has a way of stealing it away from you or denying it altogether. Living alone becomes the ultimate test of your ability to do so. Sure, you can make a phone call or shoot someone a message. But the difference between reaching out to someone and having someone in your living room is the difference in the alcoholic knowing a drink is around the corner and having a bottle in the cabinet. Every extra step between you and false peace is an opportunity to find the real thing.
That has been the work of my last year — growing comfortable with empty spaces both real and figurative. Most people who struggle with living alone find the pragmatic skills of life hardest to acquire without a judgmental eye looming over their shoulder — making yourself responsible to yourself. Mine is a similar battle with self-parenting, except I seek soothing words over rules and regulatons.
I have had to trap my fears in this one bedroom with me, like a cage match. It can be an awful and horrific experience of unreality, dissociation, and the cold surface of an empty bed. But the benefit of striking down an anxiety on your own is watching it being snuffed out and knowing it is dead. Not because you watched it die, or remember the assurance you found at the time. True peace comes from knowing simply because you know, trusting your own authority.
If all this sounds mad and desperate, I am sorry. If it sounds familiar and relatable, I am even more sorry. But I’m coming to love the music of these mornings spent alone at a kitchen table — the muffled chatter of my neighbor’s TV, the periodic click of a coffee pot, the silken purring of a hungry cat. A silence I once filled with the howls of imagined demons is actually not silence at all. It is rife with the life I make for myself with no one around to tell me otherwise.
