Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “My Loneliness Is Thrilling Me”.
I think I was about five years old when I first tried to move out of my parents’ house. I stuffed a few pieces of clothing into a yellow plastic grocery bag, walked over to the front door, and asked my mother to please open it since I couldn’t reach the lock.
I don’t remember what prompted this declaration of independence, but I do remember my mother’s response. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “I’m going to live by myself now,” I replied matter-of-factly. “But you’re not even allowed to cross the street by yourself yet, hokees.”
I hadn’t thought of that. She did have a point. I would have to grow up first.
It’s not that I was unhappy at home. I grew up in a loving family, with two younger sisters who came along in quick succession. But even as a little girl, I was itching to explore the world beyond our front door. Whenever we went to the park, I wanted to wander past the fences, eager to mosey down all the other streets and find everything else that lay beyond its boundaries. I wanted to see and do more than most other kids I played with ever seemed interested in.
Instead, I was at the mercy of my parents’ rules, and with two sisters so close in age, I had to share practically everything. I loved my family, but I hated feeling confined, with a whole world out there waiting to be discovered while I was stuck waiting for permission to see it. I wanted adventure, my own space, and the freedom to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
And yet, for all my precocious enthusiasm to break out on my own as soon as I possibly could, there were certain manifestations of it in others that would disturb me for years to come. For instance, whenever I saw someone eating alone in a restaurant, I would be overwhelmed by a mixture of pity and shock, thinking: How sad! Does this poor person have no friends or family? Why doesn’t anyone want to eat with them?
It didn’t occur to me until I was well into my thirties that perhaps these solitary diners had actually chosen to eat alone, and might even be thoroughly enjoying themselves. The thought was almost revolutionary. But understanding that possibility was one thing; learning to appreciate it for myself was quite another.
For years, I was a walking contradiction. I bounced around the world from one UN posting to another, fiercely adaptive to challenging environments and perfectly capable of building a life wherever I landed. I had also developed a remarkable talent for making fast and furious friends, something of an occupational skill among UN workers accustomed to regularly uprooting themselves.
But for all my apparent independence, I could hardly bear the thought of being alone. I was never entirely at peace unless I was in a relationship, even a long-distance one. In fact, I often preferred those. They offered the reassurance of having someone in my life while leaving me free to enjoy my precious time and space. I wanted to be on my own, but for some reason I couldn’t stand to feel it.
I can see this most clearly when I think back to my years in Cambodia, where I had moved just after my first divorce. Having finally broken free from a marriage that nearly destroyed me, what did I do? I rented an enormous, beautiful apartment with several bedrooms and far more space than any single person could reasonably need. Then I proceeded to have multiple copies of the keys made and distribute them to people I had only recently met, some of whom I barely knew.
I was ostensibly being sociable, even generous. My home was everyone’s home! Except that, looking back, I recognize what I was really doing. I was terrified of being left to the pleasure (or, what at the time felt like, the horror) of my own company. Having finally gained all the financial, geographical, and every other imaginable facet of freedom and independence five-year-old-me could have ever dreamed of, I had no idea of what to do with it, and my first instinct was to make sure I never had to fully experience it.
Only very recently have I begun to discover just how much I had been missing. For most of my adult life, I have been in long and serious romantic relationships. Before, between, and after both my marriages, there have been long-term boyfriends and shorter periods of singledom that generally involved casually dating several people at a time. Finding a man was never difficult for me. Finding myself, on the other hand, has turned out to be the challenge of a lifetime.
In a relationship, even a good one, your life inevitably becomes intertwined with someone else’s. Decisions become joint decisions. Plans become shared plans. Your time, energy, habits, priorities, and even your sense of the future become shaped, to varying degrees, by the presence of another person. None of this is inherently bad. In fact, much of it is what makes intimate relationships so meaningful and rewarding.
But when relationships become your default setting, you become so accustomed to thinking in terms of we that you rarely stop to ask what I actually want. And if you’re anything like me, you might have spent a disconcerting amount of your time and energy between those relationships trying to get someone to pick you, even shapeshifting to get them to choose you. You might have mistaken their validation of your desirability for true connection and compatibility, all to avoid the gritty work of being all that and more for yourself, by yourself.
Which brings me to the present. Earlier this year, I made a conscious decision to stop organizing my life around the prospect, or the existence, of a romantic relationship. To “decenter men,” as the expression goes.
This is not because I don’t like men—which, of course, I sometimes don’t. They can be insufferable. But overall, I actually love men. Maybe too much! And it’s certainly not because I’ve renounced romance, intimacy, or the possibility of falling madly in love again. I simply no longer want the search for, or presence of, a partner to occupy so much time, space and energy that could, and should, otherwise be devoted to discovering who I am, growing on my own terms, chasing my dreams, and achieving my goals.
And the experience has been nothing short of thrilling.
There are, of course, the delicious little freedoms that come with living alone. My apartment is exactly as I want it. I can do what I want, when I want, without consulting, accommodating, explaining, or negotiating with anyone. I can change my plans on a whim, disappear into a book, or spend an entire evening doing absolutely nothing. Without the constant emotional activity that accompanies serial dating or committed entanglements—the expectations, compromises, preoccupations, and sometimes the drama—I have found myself with a treasure trove of time and attention to devote to my own inner life. I can finally figure out what makes me truly happy when there is nobody else whose happiness I have to factor into the equation. And I can invest so much more into the non-romantic relationships that mean the most to me.
This isn’t to say that I don’t date anymore. Of course I do. But now I approach it with ruthless discernment and surgical precision, cutting things off at the first sign of a red flag rather than treating it as a challenge to overcome or a case to investigate. And it’s not like I’ve attained some magnificent state of permanent self-sufficiency where the loneliness never gets to me. In fact, sometimes it hits me like a ton of bricks, and I can suddenly regress into a much younger version of myself, one who craves love and attention and is absolutely convinced that everyone has forgotten she exists.
I don’t have children, by choice, whereas most people my age do. Their lives are understandably filled with families, children, school schedules, and all the demands that come with them. Meanwhile, I often find myself standing on the sidelines of everyone else’s busy lives, wondering: Hello? Where is everybody? Why have you all forsaken me?
I can even get a little outraged when someone I love hasn’t called me in a while. Including my own mother in Montreal, who spent my whole life sticking her nose into everything, checking up on me and being overprotective, but now seems to have decided I’m just fine because she’s seen my stories on Facebook, figures I’m travelling or busy, so she should leave me in peace and doesn’t want to bother me.
Imagine that. Respecting my privacy and space. The nerve.
So, not long ago, I complained to her that nobody ever called me anymore. Didn’t they love me? Didn’t they care about me? My mother, bless her, sprang into action and put out some sort of alert, because suddenly everyone started calling me. At the same time. Which, naturally, became slightly annoying.
I mean, honestly, can’t a woman have a moment to herself?
It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to learn that if I want to speak to someone, I can just pick up the phone and call them without thinking twice. I don’t have to sit around feeling neglected, waiting for people to read my mind that today happens to be one of those days when I could use a little extra affection. So, wait, I can just… ask for it? And they’ll be there? Because they love me and they’re generally delighted to hear from me? Interesting. Drama over. Hello, epiphany.
And moving to Armenia has added another dimension to this experience that I couldn’t appreciate quite as much in all the other places I’ve lived. There is something so comforting about living in a place where everyone seems vaguely familiar. Half the people I pass on the street look like they could be relatives. It’s as though I’ve landed in one enormous, slightly chaotic extended family. And for someone who has spent much of her adult life living abroad, often in places where I was unmistakably a foreigner, that feeling is difficult to overstate.
It has also improved my relationship with solitude. I work from home, in an apartment high up in a high-rise building, so far removed from the street below that I can barely see what’s happening down there. So, when I’m immersed in a demanding project, I can easily go several days without seeing another human being. No partner or kids at home, no colleagues at the office. Just me, my work, and a very intimate relationship with my computer.
Recently, after one of those particularly intense stretches, I suddenly felt desperately thirsty for human connection. So, I went outside. That was it. No elaborate social plans. No dinner invitations—I didn’t have time for those then. No frantic phone calls to assemble a gathering. Just a walk around my block. I’d say a good three-quarters of the people I passed either offered a smile or returned mine. The guys at reception in my building’s lobby greeted me with their usual warmth. My regular lady at the grocery store was her customary sweet self when I stopped in to buy some chocolate. By the time I got home, I felt completely recharged.
And then there’s the seemingly endless opportunities to go out, meet people, see friends, and participate in the vibrant social life that makes Yerevan so special. I’m never really wanting for company here. If anything, I have the luxury of choosing when to embrace it and when to retreat. Armenia gives me a sense of belonging without demanding my constant participation. I can disappear into my own world for days or travel for weeks at a time, and whenever I resurface, my country and my people are still there, waiting for me with open arms.
Still, every now and then, I catch myself wondering whether I’m getting a little too comfortable with my solitude. What if I become so accustomed to having things entirely my way that I lose the desire, or even the ability, to share my life with someone again? After all, relationships require compromise, and compromise is a muscle that probably shouldn’t be allowed to atrophy completely.
But then I remind myself that enjoying my own company is not the same as rejecting someone else’s. I haven’t stopped wanting love. I’ve simply stopped needing a relationship to feel that my life is complete. I want a partner who enriches a life I already love, not one who rescues me from a life I don’t know how to inhabit alone. I want to be able to distinguish genuine compatibility from the comfort of companionship, attraction from attachment, and love from the fear of being without it.
I don’t regret the years I’ve spent in romantic relationships. They’ve been an important part of my education. But I do sometimes wonder how much sooner I might have come to know myself if I hadn’t spent so much of my adult life sharing it with someone else. Then again, perhaps this is simply the age at which I was finally ready to learn.
What I do know is that solitude, once so intimidating that I handed out apartment keys to near-strangers just to avoid it, has become one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. And when the time comes to give someone a key to my new home, it won’t be because I can’t bear the thought of being there alone. It’ll be because, after discovering just how wonderful my own company can be, I’ve found someone whose company I find just as wonderful, if not more so.
Of course, there are still those occasional moments when my loneliness thrills me like I’m in a Michael Jackson music video, with the monsters of abandonment emerging from the shadows to chase me into a dark forest. But those moments are becoming increasingly rare.
These days, the thrill is much more like an exhilarating rollercoaster ride. The kind that makes your stomach flip, your heart race, and leaves you laughing at the sheer unexpected joy of conquering yet another fear.
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Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.
