With tears in their eyes, they closed the apartment door and were gone.
The latching lock rang in my mind far longer than in the empty room, realization rose over me and the barren apartment like a dying sun.
For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.
Everything suddenly felt heavy. The weight of life unlike anything I’d experienced. I had to sit down. The dog, a Jack Russell/beagle mix, eyeballed me from his sprawled out position, then laid back down.
I had fixated on this event. Moving from my childhood home in Michigan to Savannah, Georgia for college. Fixated on a new destination. A new freedom. A new self.
I didn’t realize how empty I’d feel when it came. My reflection in the tube television trapped within its gray border. He and the dog didn’t know what to do next. How to think. How to continue.
Neither I nor my reflection had anticipated this feeling. Or the need to do more than discover a new city. The need to discover ourselves.
Discovering Yourself
Self-discovery is not one of those things someone can help you with. There’s no coach offering words of encouragement or yelling motivations through a megaphone. It’s something only you can do.
It’s what makes it so difficult.
Knowing ourselves inside and out sounds easy. It’s not. Because we rarely are fully isolated and are forced to rely on ourselves.
Up until I moved away for college, I’d never truly been on my own. Sure, I moved out of my parent’s house at 18, but I was never really on my own. I still stopped by multiple times a week. If I needed help with something I could go to a friend's house. We still hung out on the weekends. There’s a symbiotic relationship between everyone else in our lives, and when this dependency is ever-present, it’s difficult to know how we might react without that help.
It’s why true self-discovery can’t happen when surrounded by friends. Or when living with family.
You’ve probably heard someone say they are taking a break from dating because they want to learn how to love themselves first. Maybe even you have said it before.
It’s a good idea. Knowing more about yourself will only make any future relationship that much more meaningful. It will help you avoid the connections that will drag you down. You’ll know what you’re worth, what you deserve, and what you don’t.
And yet how much self-discovery is happening when surrounded by loved ones. Don’t get me wrong, that security blanket is a fantastic feeling. But the truest understanding comes when you’re fully exposed. How will you respond? How will you grow?
To discover yourself, you must be alone with yourself.
Populated Isolation
A year ago I traveled the country on my own with my two dogs in an old camper. COVID more or less forced my hand (that’s an entirely different story), but instead of staying in the back room of my sister’s house, which I knew would melt me down into a puddle of wax, I decided to set out and be on my own.
It forced me to depend solely on myself. Truck transmission goes out in the middle of nowhere? Sucks. But what do you do about it? There’s no lever of yelling or crying or praying that’s going to fix it. Or coming down with COVID, again, in the middle of nowhere. There’s no mom to bring over medicine and soup. No delivery service that’ll drop off pizza. There’s nothing, but myself, and discovering how to handle the situations.
I discovered more about myself in that year than I had ever, possibly in my entire existence. In certain situations, it’s necessary to adapt or to die.
Now, I’m not saying you need to go out and isolate yourself in the middle of the words to discover yourself. That’s not realistic. But cutting yourself off, even for a few hours, can teach you more about yourself than you ever might have managed.
Try taking yourself out to a restaurant. Just you. No friends. No family. Or see a movie at the theater on your own. Do anything you might normally do with friends but do it on your own. Yeah, at first you will feel alone. Isolated. Maybe even a little afraid. But you might also discover just how much you enjoy spending time with yourself. That instead of deferring to your friends to choose the movie you can pick out your own, without worrying what someone might think.
Because if you’re afraid to go out on your own, to spend time by yourself, what are you really afraid of? And maybe that alone should point out that you have much to learn about yourself.
The more you know and love about yourself, the less you will care what others think. Because you know what you deserve, and what you don’t.
Self discovery is easy, and yet it can be incredibly difficult. It’s not something you can just blink and expect to happen. You can’t announce to the world that you’re going to focus on loving yourself, and then do exactly the same things you were doing before the proclamation.
Sometimes discovering yourself is forced upon you. Maybe you blew out a tire, had never changed one before, and didn’t have cell phone service. You might have had an initial panic, but when you realized you had only yourself to rely on, you got to work, pulled the tire and jack out of the trunk, and figured it out. Sure, it was an annoyance, but you damn well didn’t need anyone else. You learned you could rely on yourself, and not anyone else.
And that’s just the beginning, because what else can you discover about yourself that you didn’t realize you could accomplish? It’s limitless.
So get to know yourself better. Spend some time with only you. Little by little, you’ll see who you are, you’ll learn new things about yourself. And you’ll discover just how strong you can be.
The only thing hotter than a Savannah night is forbidden love.
My romance novel “The Forbidden Book Club” is out now! Help support me and check it out!