Alone, not abandoned…

I was sitting by the window on a train from Milan to Rome, watching the Italian countryside move past me, when the thought arrived without warning. I am alone. Not just on this trip. In life, more or less, the way I have built it these last few years.

For most of my life that thought would have landed like a verdict. It would have meant something was wrong with me, or something was coming for me, or both. Instead, sitting there with the hills going by, I felt relief. A kind of light, delightful tingling moved through my body, and I caught myself smiling while writing notes in my journal. Nobody was watching. I was not performing peace for anyone. I just felt it.

I have spent a long time afraid of that word, alone. I think a lot of us have. We hear it and we translate it immediately into something else. Unwanted. Unchosen. Left behind. We assume that if we are comfortable in our own company, there must be something we are avoiding, some deficiency we are covering up by pretending we prefer the quiet. I used to wonder that about myself too. If I love being alone this much, am I actually just afraid of being close to anyone again.

But sitting on that train, I understood the fear had the wrong target. I was never afraid of being alone. I was afraid of abandoning myself again.

For way too many years I was good at disappearing inside what someone else needed me to be. I learned to read a room before I read my own feelings. I learned to make myself smaller, quieter, easier, because that was what kept things calm. I was rarely alone in those years. I was almost never by myself. And I have never in my life felt more abandoned than I did in that marriage, surrounded, accounted for on paper, and still somehow absent from my own life.

That is the distinction I did not have language for until that train ride. Being alone is a fact about how many people are in the room. Being abandoned is what happens when you are the one who leaves you, over and over, to keep someone else comfortable. I had confused the two for so long that solitude itself felt dangerous, like it was a door back to that old erasure. What I felt on that train was the opposite. For the first time in longer than I can remember, no one needed me to be anything other than exactly what I was in that seat, looking out a window, unbothered, looking forward to my time in Rome.

I still catch the old pattern sometimes. A friend will say something kind, will admire something about me, and some part of me wants to shrink it down before it fully lands. I have been practicing catching that instinct and doing something different. I let myself say thank you and actually mean it. I let the compliment sit in me for a second instead of reflecting it back out of habit. It sounds small. It has not been small.

I do not think choosing solitude and wanting connection are opposites. I have made real effort with the people in my life, and I have loved the time I have spent with friends this past year. What I am no longer willing to do is trade myself for closeness. If love comes again, I want it to include the freedom I have now, not replace it. I want to be admired and supported and fully seen, cringe moments included, by someone who does not need me to disappear to make room for them.

The girl who used to be afraid of ending up alone was actually afraid of something else the whole time. She was afraid of losing herself again. On that train, somewhere between Milan and Rome, I think I finally understood the difference. I was not alone. I had just, for once, stopped abandoning myself to be anywhere else.