5.28.2012

Alone Time?

I hate being alone.

If I were to write an autobiography, it would begin with those words. Being alone is probably my greatest fear: greater than my fear of tight spaces (which is substantial) or of heights (which is even more substantial). I suppose it's scarier because it's a different kind of a fear. It's a fear of something which I can't run away from. Myself.

I am scared of my own thoughts. Scared to be alone in a room with myself, without anything to distract me. Ever since I was little I've been this way - I was not the child who could sit and be content playing by herself. I was the high-maintenance child who constantly begged her mother to play with her.

It's because I think too much, really, and that's something that's always bothered me about my writing. I always feel so heavy when I write, like everything that I write has some deep, solemn meaning (such as this post). I run away from my thoughts, because my thoughts are usually self-critical ones. I can't just sit and think about anything. If I'm going to think, I'm going to THINK. And THINKing is exhausting. Since that's all I do when I'm alone, I don't want to be alone, because I'm afraid of getting caught inside of a funk that I won't be able to crawl out of again.

At the same time as I'm thinking and feeling too deeply, all my characters feel shallow and monotonous, because they all reflect my own feelings, instead of their own individual ones. I don't know enough about them...all the focus is on me. And my solemn thoughts make every moment of my story solemn, and the same as the moment before it.

Perhaps I don't spend enough time alone. I THINK too much, but I don't EXPERIENCE enough. I don't know anything about human nature, because I haven't learned my own feelings about different experiences. I can't write about my character experiencing something on their own, if I don't know what it feels like to be alone. What do you do, when you're alone? What do you think about? What do you see? Is the world different when there's no one there to experience it with you?

But, then again, what proof is there that something happened, if you don't have anyone to verify the experience for you?

Oh, the world is so odd.




2 comments:

  1. It seems almost too obvious that we are made for others and not ourselves.

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  2. Yes indeed! Even as I begin to learn how to appreciate "alone time", the only thing which makes that alone time bearable is the knowledge that I am loved and appreciated and needed by others, and that I need, appreciate, and love them. Even when we're by ourselves, we're never truly alone.

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