Untold Reasons For Needing To Be Alone

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In our society where elongated moment of silence and social avoidance are often understood as exclusivity, foul and condescending personality, we often caught ourselves suppressing the itching need for being alone. When all those years of being out in the crowd, fully presenting ourselves to constant chit chats and punned jokes, side criticisms and judgments, unsolicited life advice and the nature of our work, friends and family’s non-stop nagging for doing mundane and orthodox things, we as human beings, slowly distorts our peace of mind that often result in much unprecedented things like exploding and obliterating relationships we have.

Different people need different reasons for being alone, it may be because we just wanted to finish our project and work deadlines, or it may be to create inspiring paintings, writing or sculptures. It could even just be a time to breathe. But for some of us who needs an intermittent but unusually longer than normal, social retreat, for the benefit of our sanity, it could be much scarier and dangerous thing to indulge, which in our culture often sees as rude – or in our workplace, an unqualified and defective employee.

We, introverts, have been the subject of social ridicule because of our weird obsession for stretched out social absence. We burnout ourselves by hiding the need for social recharging from our workplace which demands for high functional employees with good energy and personality. Piling up to this, is our societies neediness for maintaining relationships and creating new ones, where day to day small talks are often the golden sign of a good and healthy citizen. Then lately, social media apps, caught us unaware by having an irrational need to compare our lives to the lives of those people in our screen, making us much hungry for the society’s standard of success so we can have just a wee bit space in the superficial world of social validation.

Our mind gets a little more clogged up like a sink full of dirt and grime. Because there’s so much to this world than we could ever be aware of, there’s a lot of conversation that plays on constant repeat in our mind but sadly we don’t have the time and solitude to dissect its meaning and message. There’s opportunities knocking on our doors and windows but we mistook it as threats so we closed it all down, losing the sense of adventure and starts to settle in on our own mediocre comfort zone.

Then the drudgery of daily grind eats its way inside our mind, the emotional numbness starts crippling inside our body without us even aware of what is happening. We slowly lose our love and passion for what we do, patience is slowly deteriorating and the burnouts from different stress of life are piling up, stacking on each other brick by brick. Waiting for an opportunity to explode and eradicate the very few good relationships we have. Then depression starts to kick in real hard. Physical symptoms seem to take in effect, our body gets a little heavier, breaths a little bit shorter, feeling exhausted and even more tired every proceeding day. We lose quality sleep and start to feel sick. Fatigue, dizziness and headache become the new normal.

When these symptoms start to show up, it’s our body’s way of shouting and kicking us in the butt for doing something for ourselves. To start seeking diagnosis on where the burnout, stress and problem come from, to listen to what really is happening inside our brain. Having a day, week or month of off-time and alone time can help us assess on what really happened in our fast, paced life. Because taking time to take care of ourselves is never selfish, it’s never rude nor condescending. It’s a matter of survival and maintaining a sane life.

So, If only we can find the strength to overcome the social judgment and put our own need before everyone and everything else. Giving ourselves the much awaited, longer stretches of social retreat and basking in the glory of me-time can not only help ourselves, but also the people around us. Because when we face the world fully recharged and cleansed, we can now offer ourselves to be a little bit more intimate, friendly and sympathetic to the lives of other people. We can open our eyes to the optimist side of the world and have the courage to do what the unheard heed of passion and purpose calls. Because when we feel emotionally at peace within ourselves, we can now give the world the best version of ourselves… for a moment.

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