“I Don’t Think I Ever Learned How to Be Alone”
“I’ve always had someone—family, roommates, partners, friends around constantly. And now that it’s just me, I’m not okay. I thought I’d enjoy the quiet, but it’s not quiet. It’s loud. My thoughts, the silence, the nothingness—it all feels like too much. I don’t think I ever actually learned how to be alone.”
Dear Tyler,
Your words carry a kind of truth that gets overlooked too often. Not everyone learns how to be alone—not emotionally, not psychologically, and certainly not culturally. We talk about independence as if it’s a switch we can flip when needed. But what you’ve named is something deeper than being alone in a room. It’s about the feeling of being with yourself—and how foreign, even threatening, that can feel when you’ve never been taught how to do it safely.
There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. And then there’s a third thing entirely: solitude dysregulation. That’s the emotional storm that rises when you’re alone and your system doesn’t know how to hold you. It’s not just boredom. It’s panic. It’s the mental noise, the emotional static, the memories, the looping thoughts—all of it flooding in when there’s no one else to distract you or absorb your nervous energy.
And that’s where a lot of people get stuck—not because they’re weak, but because their nervous systems never had a chance to learn that solitude could be safe. For many, being alone was never modeled as a nourishing state. It was punishment. Isolation. The emotional equivalent of being sent to your room. Or it was simply nonexistent—because they were always in a home full of other people’s noise, need, or chaos.
So when life finally quiets down—when the partner leaves, or the house empties, or the phone stops buzzing—it doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like abandonment. Or exposure. Or an unbearable confrontation with everything that’s been waiting to speak to you in the silence.
That’s the paradox. So many people say they want peace. But when it arrives in the form of stillness, they flinch. Because peace isn’t just calm—it’s what’s left when there’s no one around to distract you from your inner world. And if that inner world has been neglected, avoided, or overloaded, then being alone can feel like a reckoning.
Tyler, if no one ever taught you how to be alone, it makes perfect sense that it doesn’t feel natural now. Emotional self-regulation is a learned skill. And when you’ve always had external regulators—people to process with, distract with, manage you, or just be there—you may not have had the space, or the need, to develop the muscles of solitude.
That’s not a personal failure. That’s emotional infrastructure you never had the opportunity to build.
And it’s never too late to learn.
But first, let’s acknowledge what’s actually happening here. When you say, “It’s loud,” I believe you. That loudness isn’t just in your mind—it’s your nervous system, your memories, your fear, your unmet grief, your questions, all rising at once. That’s not pathological. That’s backlog. That’s emotional weight finally asking to be noticed.
And that can be terrifying.
That’s why many people rush back into relationships, environments, or routines—not because they’re necessarily wrong for them, but because they can’t yet tolerate what arises in the pause. Because no one told them that stillness would be this loud, or this disorienting, or this charged.
Here’s what I want to offer you gently: the discomfort you’re feeling now is not a sign that you’re failing. It’s a sign that you’re at the beginning of an entirely new way of relating to yourself.
It won’t always feel this jarring.
The noise does quiet.
But not by avoiding it. By slowly, steadily befriending it.
You don’t need to leap into perfect, peaceful solitude overnight. You start with tolerating it for a few minutes. Then a few more. You create rituals around being alone—not just time to kill, but ways of being with yourself that feel anchored.
That might mean making tea and sitting on the floor instead of scrolling.
It might mean narrating your thoughts out loud just to feel a presence.
It might mean journaling what the silence says instead of trying to shut it down.
It might mean doing nothing for ten minutes and reminding yourself: I’m not in danger. This is just new.
And eventually, it begins to shift.
You begin to recognize the difference between loneliness and presence.
You begin to feel your own companionship.
You begin to trust that being alone isn’t something to survive—it’s something that can hold you.
But only if it becomes safe.
So that’s the real work here—not pushing yourself to “like” being alone, but learning to make aloneness emotionally inhabitable.
That might involve therapy. It might involve inner child work. It might involve rewriting what solitude meant to you as a child—when being alone might have meant being neglected, or punished, or unprotected. Because those meanings linger, even into adulthood.
And what you’re doing now, Tyler, is rewriting all of it.
You are in the reorientation stage—where what used to feel normal no longer fits, but the new isn’t comfortable yet. That middle place is raw. But it’s also a sign that something is growing. That your self-trust is starting to unfurl, even if it’s still scared.
Being alone is not the same as being unloved.
Being alone is not proof of failure.
Being alone is a skill—and a relationship—you are allowed to develop at your own pace.
And the fact that you’re not running from this? That you’re sitting in it, even while afraid? That’s courage.
You’re not broken.
You’re building the kind of companionship that doesn’t leave when the room empties.
And that’s a foundation that no one can take from you.
With you in the quiet,
–RJ