If you can’t be alone, every other person becomes a life raft.
That’s harsh and I’ve lived it, so I’m allowed. The cling isn’t love yet. It’s panic management. The other person feels it even when your words are sweet.
Winnicott wrote about the capacity to be alone as something that grows from good enough early presence. You internalize a sense that you exist even when nobody is actively entertaining you. A lot of adults are missing pieces of that and doing their best with headphones and group chats.
Solitude is where your thoughts stop performing. It’s also where they get weird and loud. Both are why people avoid it. The feed is a portable crowd. Useful. Also a way to never hear yourself.
I’m not anti-phone in a purity way. I like memes. I like group chats that feel like a porch. I am anti losing the muscle of sitting in a room with my own mind without flinching.
Intimacy needs that muscle. Otherwise you don’t bring a self to the other person. You bring a hunger. They can’t eat enough to fill it.
Practicing solitude can look humble. Twenty minutes on a walk without a podcast. Journaling that isn’t for posting. Cooking without a show. Lying on the floor with one record.
If alone time instantly turns into self-attack, that’s not proof solitude is bad. That’s proof you need softer company inside your head, and maybe outside help. Start smaller. Five minutes. A shower without a plan for your personality.
The goal isn’t isolation. The goal is a self that can stand on its own feet long enough to choose closeness instead of drowning into it.
Alone, then with. With, then alone. The rhythm is the point.