I’ve been sitting with this for a while now, trying to figure out how to even start writing about it, because it’s one of those things that feels too big and too small at the same time. Living alone. I think I need to start with the fear, because the fear came first, and it came from somewhere I still can’t fully locate. I avoided living alone for basically my whole adult life. There was always a reason — I was studying, I was working some low-paying job that barely covered rent with someone else’s help, I was in survival mode in one way or another. And all of that was real. I genuinely couldn’t afford it for a long time. But if I’m being honest with myself, I think even when I technically could have made it work, some part of me found a way not to. A roommate here. A family member there. Anybody, really, as long as I wasn’t the only name on the lease of my own life. I don’t know exactly where the fear came from. I’ve turned that question over so many times. Maybe I heard someone say once that living alone sucks, that it’s lonely, that you’ll go a little strange in the quiet. Maybe it was never even mine to begin with — maybe it was borrowed somewhere along the way, picked up from someone else’s anxiety and worn as if it were my own. So finally — finally, at this point in my life — I was in a position where I could actually do it. I could afford to live alone. And I did. And the first two weeks were, genuinely, some of the hardest of my adult life. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just this constant low hum of unease. I remember lying there at night and hearing some small sound come from another room and my whole body would go on alert. I’d get up. I’d turn on every light like I was preparing for something. I’d walk through my own home checking room by room. And there was never anything there. I called people a lot in those first weeks too. Friends, family, anyone who would pick up. I didn’t really have anything urgent to say — I just needed a voice in the space that wasn’t mine, some proof that I wasn’t the only living thing in the apartment. Looking back now I can see so clearly what that was — it was me trying to fill the silence before the silence could tell me anything. And then, somewhere past those first two weeks, something shifted. I stopped getting up to check the other room. I stopped needing to call someone just to hear a voice. The silence stopped sounding like something waiting to get me and started sounding like — nothing. Just quiet. Just mine. And that shift, small as it sounds, is maybe the whole story right there. Because on the other side of that fear was something I didn’t expect, which was freedom. It’s a small, domestic, almost boring kind of freedom, which I think might actually be the realest kind. I rearranged my whole apartment around my own rhythms. I moved my speaker into the kitchen so I can put on something soft in the mornings while I make breakfast, music that’s for absolutely no one but me. I set up a writing desk in the spot that gets the best light in the afternoon. I can buy groceries — anything, really, something a little nicer than I need — and just buy it, no silent calculation in my head about whether it’s too much. I can walk around my own apartment in my underwear on a random Tuesday afternoon and not think twice about it. These are small things. But they’ve started to add up into something that doesn’t feel small at all, which is that I get to live according to my own standard now. And underneath all of that, there’s something harder I’m still learning. For most of my life I put other people before myself, almost automatically, as a kind of reflex I never really questioned. I understand why that reflex formed. It reads as humility. It reads as being generous, considerate, a good person. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be that. But what I’ve slowly come to realize is that constantly putting other people first, for years and years, without pause, doesn’t just make you generous. It also means you never actually find out who you are underneath all that consideration. I got so good at climbing into other people’s heads — figuring out what they wanted, what they were hoping for, what would make their lives easier — and then quietly working to make it happen for them, that I basically never did that same work for myself. I don’t think I even really knew how. That kind of constant self-erasure doesn’t just evaporate somewhere. It settles. It sits in you. And if you never let it out, it turns into something like resentment, quiet and low, the kind you can’t quite point to a specific example of, made instead of a thousand small moments of choosing someone else over yourself, repeated so many times you stopped noticing you were doing it at all. So now, alone, I’m doing something that feels almost embarrassingly small in scale but has actually been enormous — I’m just observing myself. What makes me feel alive and awake. What makes me feel flat and depleted. What I actually like, versus what I’ve just gotten good at tolerating over the years because tolerating things was the safer option. I write in a diary now — like this, like what I’m doing right now — without the old habit of wondering if someone’s going to secretly read it later. I bought a mirror recently. It’s less about vanity and more that I realized, almost with a kind of shock, that I had basically stopped looking at myself. I mean actually looking, actually seeing. My own existence. My own worth. Sitting with my own face and not looking away from it. It sounds so small when I write it out like that. But I think it’s actually enormous. I think you cannot love something you’ve spent years refusing to actually look at. I don’t think I want to live alone forever. I want community eventually. Friends close by. Family around. People who know this version of me, the one that’s forming right now in this apartment. But I think that comes after this part. I think this work of building a real “me” has to happen first, before I could ever build a real “we” with anyone. Otherwise I’d have just kept doing what I always did — disappearing a little into whoever I was with. This is where it’s happening. In the sounds from the other room that turned out to be nothing, over and over, until my body finally believed it. In the mirror. In the desk that catches the good light in the afternoon. In the music no one else has to like. I think I understand something now that I didn’t before. For most of my life, home was never a place to me. Home was wherever my people were. I followed my mom around like that, growing up — wherever she was standing, that’s where home was, and everywhere else just felt like waiting. In Mongolia it was the same, home was my friends, my family, the people I was close to, not the ground under my feet. So when I finally ended up alone, away from all of that, I think that’s really what the fear was under all the other fear. It was that I looked around and didn’t see home anywhere, because I’d never once built it out of anything except other people. But sitting with myself like this, actually getting to know myself instead of everyone around me, I’m starting to feel something settle that I didn’t expect. I’m starting to feel grounded. Like home was never a place I had to keep finding in other people. It’s something I can build wherever I am. The grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s greener where you water it. And I think I finally started watering my own. I just needed this. I needed it so badly, and I didn’t even fully know how badly until I finally let myself have it. Right now, at this exact, specific point in my life, I needed to be alone with myself for long enough to actually meet her, and to finally plant something of my own instead of waiting to find it somewhere else. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zusmee.substack.com
