Am I alone or lonely?

I spend a fair amount of time alone, but honestly get very little alone time. SAY WHAAAATTTT???

Yep, I am not alone in that I play many roles. I am a full-time human. I may only have 50% custody of my boys, but I am 100% of the time still their mom. I am an entrepreneur, and for me that means I wear many hats in my business. Being pretty new to all of this, I spend a lot of time wearing all the hats. I have a lively community of people who support me, and I try to get in enough quality time with each of them. On top of all of that, I create distractions when I am really stressed to avoid things I need to do that are hard, or as an attempt to alleviate some of my discomfort.

So when I say I don’t have a lot of alone time, it’s because all of these aspects of my life fill that time that I’m alone - sometimes by necessity and sometimes unnecessarily.

In the period of time immediately after my divorce, I didn’t know how to be alone. In my eyes, alone = lonely. And I was not interested in that (that might be a bit dramatic, but it was definitely a VERY difficult period). The only way to fix that terrible equation was by learning to be alone and not fearing that experience.

Now let me pause and say everyone will take something different from this based on their own experience. There are varying degrees to which each of us experience this, if we do. The common thread is that we all experience discomfort, and we have two options of how to respond: avoiding or moving through. If we move through it, which I’ll recommend all of us to do, we have to do it in small, tolerable doses: allowing ourselves to be challenged, but not overwhelmed.

How did I build up my tolerance for being alone in the ways I had been avoiding? It was a process that included therapy, reiki, yoga teacher training, meditation, journaling, social support, energy work, and ultimately BEING ALONE.

If I had to sum up MY process…

Clearing out the old shit + giving myself the opportunity to be alone = a love of my own company (roughly a 3 year journey)

If this resonates with you, and you are somewhere on this journey, just keep going. There are so many things I could have done to arrive at a similar place - ultimately what I learned along the way is there is no end point (my ego was fierce back then). This will likely be an ongoing journey… and I’m here for it.