A Moment of One’s Own

This is an article that I didn’t want to write. Perhaps it was some lingering sense of shame. Probably because it felt all too natural to me and abhorrent to everyone else. But most of all, I didn’t want to write something about myself. To explain oneself, after all, is an impossibility. Getting even half of my meaning across without nervousness or embarrassment trapping the words in my throat is a miracle. It’s a good thing that I am writing this, then. Now I have approximately five hundred words to get my point across. Which after a meandering one hundred words is that, I like to be alone. That is not the world-consuming revelation that you came here for. It is not even the mildly-interesting tidbit that you may have glanced for. But it is what you are going to get (if you stay, of course). The best part of being alone is that you have the chance to get away from the endless hubbub, the meaningless chitchat. Not that I don’t appreciate the more-than-occasional bout of jibber jabber. I can certainly jabber on with the best of them, especially if it concerns my current obsession on television. Sometimes though, after a day, or a week, of being talked at by professors or buzzing around with friends, it is nice to simply be in a room without anyone else. To sit, unobserved and unneeded. To move, unencumbered by the personal needs of someone else. To have the environment around you, the sights, the sounds, be entirely your own. Maybe it’s selfish. But it’s a ‘mine’ that I need to have. To be alone, at least to me, is also resisting the allure of the GroupMe notification, the newest Facebook update. These are unnecessary connections to the outside world, at least temporarily. They are the nagging voices, urging me to return to the loud place, but given digital shape as birthday reminders and life updates. They are distractions posing as something meaningful. I know that. But they are also act as admonitions. The smiling friends and memes show me lives where being alone does not exist. Instead, there appears to be constant social entanglements happening all around me, even as I sit in a room, alone. The pressure permeates through every aspect of the college experience. This expectation of having the best years of your life, right here, on campus drives students to late-night parties and dinner with friends. One feels the need to spend every second of those four, short years in the company of others. Others that may soon be lost to new jobs in new places. But lost in the deafening, striving progress is the need to not be needed.  I am free to pursue my own creativity only when I no longer have to fulfill any outside demands. In these moments, completely alone, I don’t need to answer to anyone or anything else other than that strange, instinctive hunger to write. I can explain myself without having to get the words out in time or even express the words semi-cleverly. Perhaps that is why I found this article so difficult to write. Perhaps that is why I needed to write it.