“I Want to Be Alone, but I Also Want to Be Missed”
“I feel like I need space—quiet, solitude, just time away from everything and everyone. But even in that craving, there’s this strange ache. I want to disappear, but I want someone to notice. I want to be alone, but not forgotten. I want the relief of solitude and the comfort of knowing I still matter to someone.”
Dear Patti,
That’s such an honest and familiar contradiction. Wanting to pull back, but not vanish. Needing space, but still longing to be felt. It’s one of the most delicate emotional places to live in—the in-between of solitude and significance. And it’s rarely understood.
People talk about needing alone time as if it’s a clean, confident choice. But what you’re describing isn’t just a boundary—it’s a hunger for something you can’t quite name. To be unbothered, but not invisible. To be free, but not floating. To step back from the noise of connection, while still tethered to care.
This is the quiet grief of the self-reliant. The ones who know how to be alone but wonder, sometimes, if anyone notices when they are.
You’re not needy for wanting to be missed. You’re human. We all want to know our presence has weight. That when we’re gone—whether for an hour, a week, or a season—someone reaches for us in the silence. Not because we’ve collapsed, not because we’ve made a scene, but because we’re loved enough to be felt even in our absence.
And yet, needing space doesn’t mean you want distance. It means you’re searching for oxygen. For quiet air to breathe in your own shape again. Sometimes we need that to return to ourselves. Especially when the world asks for performance after performance, and we haven’t had time to hear our own thoughts, let alone feel our own needs.
But yes, the ache comes. The ache of wondering: Will anyone notice? Will they check in? Will they remember I’m not here? And if they don’t—what does that mean?
Let me say this clearly: needing solitude does not cancel your need for connection. They are not opposites. They are two hands of the same reaching—one inward, one outward. One says, “Let me return to myself,” and the other says, “Please remember I exist.”
This is not contradiction. This is nuance. This is emotional truth. And the more we allow for both—alone and loved, quiet and cared for, vanished and missed—the more whole we become.
So take your space, Patti. Take all the space you need. And in that space, remember: the right people won’t forget you. And even if the world goes quiet in your absence, you are not gone. You are here, with yourself, where everything begins.
I want that kind of peace for both of us.
–RJ