Are You Addicted To Solitude?

Hello, my name is Tracy and I’m addicted to solitude.

If you suspect you may be a solitude-aholic or love someone who is, please read on.

Symptoms include:

· Extreme irritability when you don’t get enough time alone.

· Being irrationally irritated when someone’s in your personal space when they could clearly be in any space on the planet somewhere away from your space. There’s lots of space to go around, yo. Go there.

· Crying jags accompanied by fantasies of checking into a hotel room by yourself for a week where you can write and think and sing and fart and dream in peace.

· The need for a fix of solitude so intense that you’ll hook up a 32’ trailer, which you’ve never pulled before, and drive three hours to a KOA in Napa, in the rain, to seek it out. (Or maybe this one’s just me…)

· Immense feelings of relief when you do get a fix.

· Followed by guilt.

· Worries that you’re abnormal for courting, longing for, and loving what others skeptically side-eye as weird, lonely isolation.

Remedies include:

Solitude. Duh.

If you suspect that you or someone close to you suffers from a solitude addiction:

Go away.

2. Do not, under any circumstances, take it personally.

3. Realize that alone time is the go-juice that some people need the way others need a venti macchiato with an extra shot of whatever it is that makes their blood vibrate.

4. It’s not weakness or eccentricity. It takes strength to bear the weight of presence of others when all you want is a little time to be dynamically present with your own soul.

It’s striking, and arguably presumptuous, that Webster’s second definition for solitude is, “a lonely place (such as a desert).”

Such narrow definition for the vastness of space — space to commune with yourself and ALL that you contain!

I find solitude to be neither lonely nor barren. The soil of my solitude is fertile with creativity, which best germinates in the still air of silence.

In the moments that I get the solitude I crave, loneliness is impossible. The company I keep is interesting and brimming with soulful visions, thoughts, and plans that more often come to fruition when allowed to blossom in isolation.

If this is you as well, rest easy and know that you’re a brave explorer. You go where some dare never to go. Plant that solitude flag on high ground and enjoy every single solitary minute of it.