Learning to Be Alone: Being Alone Without Feeling Lonely

The word loneliness evokes the same feeling in most people:

Abandonment, lack, the sense that something has gone wrong.

Yet being on your own and feeling lonely are not the same thing.

You can sit at a crowded table and feel utterly alone; you can sit by yourself in a room and feel more “in the right place” than ever.

At the heart of Paths to Myself lies exactly this question:

Am I truly alone, or am I this afraid simply because I have never learned to stay with myself?

Some evenings, even when there are people around you, you quietly think to yourself, “I don’t belong here.”

You laugh, you talk, you join in, you listen; but you can’t say to yourself, “I am really here right now.”

Voices rise, the conversation deepens, there is a cheerful mood at the table; yet from the inside you have silently withdrawn.

Even if no one notices, you have already left that table.

The feeling of loneliness begins very often right here.

Not because you are alone, but because you cannot reach yourself.

Your body is there, your voice is there, your smile is there, but the you inside is already wandering elsewhere.

That is why loneliness is not always “being by yourself”.

Sometimes you feel most alone exactly where you are most surrounded by people.

“Is Loneliness a Deficit?”

For years we saw loneliness as a lack.

If there was no one around you, you thought you must be doing something wrong.

An empty weekend, a calendar with blank spaces, a quiet evening…

As if these were indicators of “failure” in life.

Yet a human being is not a creature that is completed only by “others”.

Yes, there is a part of us that needs relationship and contact; but there is also a part that cannot build any healthy relationship without first hearing itself.

When we see loneliness only as “the moment when no one is there”, we always experience it as something missing, wrong, to be avoided.

Yet being able to be alone means standing on the threshold of the door that opens onto the inner world.

The way for a person to make peace with themselves, to know themselves, to hear themselves, passes very often through here.

Loneliness is not, as is commonly thought, “having absolutely no one”.

Sometimes it carries a togetherness far more real than getting lost among others:

Being together with yourself.

For someone who does not know how to be alone, silence is always dangerous...

Because silence brings back repressed thoughts, postponed feelings, sentences thrown into the trash.

That is why most of us immediately turn something on the moment we are by ourselves:

Television, music, social media, a series, a film…

Anything, as long as we don’t hear the voice inside.

For a long time I too lived loneliness only at two extremes:

Either I threw myself completely into crowds, or I shut down entirely and withdrew into myself.

I learned only much later that there could be something in between: a gentle, compassionate way of being alone.

Being able to be alone is not punishing yourself.

It is certainly not trying to prove that you don’t need anyone.

Being able to be alone is being able to stay with yourself, learning to tolerate your own presence.

Being able to be alone without feeling lonely is this:

When you are by yourself, feeling not lacking, but open to becoming more whole.

Realising that even when no one is there, you can still be your own companion.

While I was writing Paths to Myself, loneliness was first a darkness for me.

When I withdrew from the crowds and returned to my room, the silence did not relax me; on the contrary, it threw all the questions inside me in my face at once.

I had to admit this to myself: I did not know how to be alone.

Being by myself immediately whispered this sentence to me: “So no one wants you.”

Yet over time I realised that what we call loneliness has two faces:

One face looks toward the denied, wounded child who says, “I am not worthy of love.”

The other face opens onto the inner journey and says, “I carry a space no one but me can fill.”

Loneliness is not only the outer world abandoning us; sometimes it is also the name of our abandoning ourselves.

Paths to Myself is in fact the record of a journey in which I confronted this abandonment and tried to step back over to my own side.

Can Loneliness Be a Door?

At some point I began to ask myself:

Is this feeling of loneliness really a punishment?

Or is it a door into my inner world that has been open but left closed for years?

If you read loneliness only as “There is no one”, of course it feels heavy.

But the same loneliness, when read as “I am finally alone with myself”, takes on a completely different meaning.

When you are alone:

You hear your own questions.

You notice your own heartbeat.

The chance that you will act not according to someone else’s expectations but according to what is really moving inside you increases.

In a crowd, you often have to keep up with other people’s rhythm.

When you are alone, you notice your own rhythm for the first time.

Maybe you are a little slow.

Maybe you have been rushing for years.

Maybe you are very quiet compared to others, but the words inside you are only just beginning to form.

Loneliness can be a space opened so that you can hear this rhythm for the first time.

If you feel lonely in the middle of crowds, you are probably very inclined to blame yourself for this feeling:

“Why am I like this?”

“Why can’t I be like everyone else?”

“Why don’t I feel happy?”

Maybe the problem is not that “you are broken”.

Maybe the problem is that you cannot find a space that suits your sensitivity, your fragility, your depth.

Feeling lonely in crowds is not always incompatibility.

Sometimes it is a sentence your soul quietly says to you:

“I am too deep for this place.

I am too sensitive for this noise.

I was not created to live only this much on the surface.”

The moment you hear this, loneliness is no longer just a dark well; it becomes a well you need to climb down into.

It is a sign not that you are ruined, but that you are being called.

You need to think of being alone as a kind of kindness towards yourself...

When you stop seeing being alone as a punishment, you can begin to see it as a right you give yourself, a gift, a space of compassion.

The moments when you can be with yourself are another way of saying:

“I am worth spending time with myself.”

“My inner voice also deserves to be heard.”

“I exist on my own as much as I exist with others.”

Learning to be by yourself is taking your own existence seriously.

It is respecting your own time.

It is intending to see yourself not only through other people’s eyes, but also through your own.

Loneliness is one of the paths to myself...

Loneliness is like a shadow that will not leave us alone as long as we keep running from it.

The more we refuse to sit down with it, ask it a question, listen to it, the bigger it grows.

But if one day you stop and ask:

“What is this loneliness trying to tell me?”

then the shadow slowly begins to take shape.

Maybe it is whispering this:

“Stop trying to grab a role in other people’s lives. Remember your leading role in your own life.”

Loneliness may not always be the dark room you imagine.

Seen from the right angle, it is a door that opens onto yourself.

Learning to be alone without feeling lonely is learning not to belittle your own existence, your own voice, your own inner world.

And perhaps what I call Paths to Myself is, more than anything, this:

Not running away from myself instead of from the crowd, and forming a new relationship with loneliness.

Not as punishment, but as calling...

Not as lack, but as a beginning...