Learning to Be Alone Again

I’d been in survival mode so long that it took a while for all the real emotions of moving out to hit me. It wasn’t until one rainy night during winter break–the first time I didn’t have my son that the tears came. Truthfully, they’d been with me since the morning, but at this point in life, I’d become a pro at finding things to distract myself. But at 11:45 at night, there is no number of scrolls to avoid the inevitable. And so, while lying on my mattress still on the floor because I hadn’t found a bed frame that called to me, I cried. First, heated pricks near my tear ducts that turned to quick droplets across my cheeks, that turned to full, heaving sobs into my pillow.

I was exactly where I wanted to be, but the realization hurt more than I’d expected it to.

When I made the decision to leave, for months I imagined what it would feel like to have a place of my own for the first time in my life. Freedom. I had Pinterest boards for decor styles. Web browser tabs left open with furniture pieces I wanted to buy. Jokes shared with my sister about how I was about to be “outside.” When I’d gotten to this point, I thought that I’d be packing up the grief from what I thought would be my life.

No one tells you the grieving process doesn’t start until you’ve left it. The life you prayed for. The grief associated with losing a future before it had a chance to begin. Watching it dissolve in real-time.

What made this so hard was that while I’d been mentally preparing for what was to come, the part of me in tune with my emotions was not yet in a safe enough space to make her presence known. Unknowingly, it was taking everything out of me to function and smile through everything going on behind closed doors.

Because how do you tell people the truth, to a lie so perfectly on display, knowing you’d be looked at like you're crazy for saying otherwise?

Robotically, I showed up to work, took care of my son, wrote books, checked boxes, smiled to hide the pain. Remain solid through the muck.

But inside, I felt hollow. Gone was my magic. Nothing felt whimsical. Alive. Everything was most certainly not in Technicolor. I moved through my days carrying an invisible weight that no amount of working through it could lift. I took on more work and found new hobbies, hoping to find a spark of something. And yet, the skies stay filled with cranes. The truth I’d been avoiding, ducking my head in the sand, pretending she wasn’t sitting in the chair next to me in every room I found myself in.

Something wasn’t working. I was no longer happy. And I’d known it for a while.

The problem was that the change would require disappointing people, uncertainty, and trusting myself.

How are you to trust yourself when you don’t even know who you are?

All my life, I’d looked to others for confirmation of decisions. I craved reassurance that I was making the right choices. What I didn’t know was that with each permission granted, my ability to discern and lean on my intuition dwindled. While she whispered to me on my shoulder, I looked away because “This is what society says should be happening.” She didn’t like that much. Multiple times she nudged me in my side like, “Girl…” Poked and prodded like, “This what you want?” Eventually, she yoked me out of my sleep and slapped me right across the cheek with, “You better do something before I do it!”

While waiting for the keys to my new place, I found myself standing at the edge of a life I’d grown okay with–like the pants you wear but the waistband cuts into your gut like a saw–and one that terrified me to no end.

bell hooks challenges the ways we’ve been taught to understand love in All About Love. She affirms that love is not a feeling but a daily action we choose. Something we commit to, trust in, take responsibility for, and respect. In this book, she also speaks to the importance of self-love and the role it plays in increasing our capacity to love others. While working my way through the book, I saw her teachings applied to more than just relationships we have with others, but also the relationship we have with ourselves.

“One of the best guides on how to be self-loving, is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving form others.”

– bell hooks, All About Love

How many of us know something is hurting us but remain silent because leaving would inconvenience someone else?

Me.

My silence kept the peace, betraying what my intuition called me out on. It made me go back to therapy, where I was then asked some difficult questions.

• If love requires trust, why didn’t I trust myself?

• If love requires care, why wasn’t I caring for myself?

• If love requires honesty, why wasn’t I being honest with myself?

I was fluent in extending compassion to everyone around me, except the person who needed it most. Me.

Leaving forced me to learn.

The first few months were strange. I had no clue what to do with all the extra time I had not dedicated to monitoring others’ needs or expectations. I entered a state of functional freeze where up was down, right was left. And for the Type-A person that I am, this feeling of not knowing how things were to go conflicted with what I wanted to be true. Grief and an endless supply of low self-esteem do that to you. Slowly, I had to learn and experiment with small pleasures to find what brought me joy, not what others said should be joyful.

It started with buying a record player–a thing I’d wanted for all my life, but hadn’t gotten because it was never the right moment. While playing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album, I brought out the measuring tape to see which drape size would work for my space. I had nary a theme nor style, I just knew I wanted pink.

Blush, Magenta, Fuchsia, Mauve, Bubblegum, Rose.

It may seem like such a small, insignificant thing, but I’d spent years downplaying the color that brought me the most joy. So much so that when others guessed my favorite color, pink was the last thing they’d answer. Something so integral to the core of who I was, reduced to nothing. As I look around my bedroom now, pink sheets, pink comforter, pink lamps, pink curtains–a room drenched in femininity–I smile.

Simple joys.

From there, the reclamation was instantaneous. I sung along with the depths of my diaphragm, “My mind has been telling me to settle down right now…Right now.” I washed, folded, and saved laundry with precision. I basked in the orange blossom-scented air, laughing at how good peace felt. Solitude. Being able to live in one’s essence without fear.

And that felt so damn good.

From there came the solo dates. A coffee shop here. A spree in the Galleria there. Matcha crawls across the state that is Houston–of which Annkello Kawaha reigns supreme. Learning about myself, my likes, my interests, my irritations. Slowly, I was learning how to move and operate without someone else’s instructional manual. Whatever I wanted became what was. From time to time, loneliness would creep in, a longing to share this joy with another person. But I’d let her sit right beside me instead. There’s a particular kind of courage required to sit alone in silence with your thoughts. But this space is needed to allow yourself to breathe, make room for all that you are. In this solitude, I learned a few key things about myself:

• I was someone grieving a life I’d never have.

• I was someone deeply capable of building a life I deserved.

• I was someone scared of what this future might hold.

• I was someone hopeful through it all.

• I was someone deserving of the tenderness she granted to everyone else.

This is what this season of my life is all about. Learning how to belong to myself. Since moving out, I’d been ruminating on all the things I’d lost. A home. A marriage. A community. And while those losses are significant to my being, they are not the entire story. Because when one chapter closes, another begins. One filled with new insight, new characters, new events that’ll bring more to an already beautiful story. As I start this chapter, here are the lessons I’m taking with me:

1. What doesn’t serve you will disappoint you time and time again.

I don’t say this to be cynical or evil. It just is. It could be waiting months to buy the $2,000 bed frame over the $200 one from Amazon, because the former is what you really want. It could be buying a pair of heels just to wear while cleaning the house, because you have no plans to go out, but mourning their absence would hurt more than the potential aches you’d incur from breaking them in. You cannot spend your life trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It just won’t work. And the disappointment will eat you from the inside out, leaving behind a festering wound that’ll cost more to heal.

2. Discernment is learning how to trust what the present is already showing you.

Your intuition as a woman is more precious than rubies. Women, especially Black women, have an inherent tether to the world through their very essence of being. This trust grows with practice. Every time you choose yourself. Every time you uphold a boundary. Every time you stop asking someone else for permission. Your intuition is the key to the kingdom. Yes, I may or may not be listening to Beyoncé as I write this. Choose yourself, little by little, day by day, until your voice becomes louder than the ones around you.

3. Uncertainty isn’t proof that something is wrong.

I spent so much of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. The rug to be pulled from under me. Calls in the middle of the night of yet another loved one going to have drinks with Luther, Whitney, and Tupac. Perhaps that’s what got me in a state where I sought outside validation–the freefall that grief throws you into. Now that I’m choosing to turn into myself, I can say I don’t know what will happen next. I don’t know what this season will mean for my marriage. I don’t know what my life will look like a year from now. What I do know is that I’m allowing space for it to unfold around me. Because a beautiful life can exist on the other side of uncertainty.

That’s what learning to be alone is all about. Not isolation. Not independence. Not proving you don’t need anyone. Your own company is safe. Your own intuition is trustworthy. Your own love is enough to carry you through a season of transition. Before we can show up for others, we must first fully show up for ourselves.

Now, as I sit in the silence of my “Girl Apartment,” I’m learning how to hear myself again.

And that feels like magic.