lonely or just alone

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed. I just started my first year of University. The preparation was a whirlwind. I arrived home from my ten months in Europe, unpacked, repacked, and moved from the West to the East coast. I moved into student housing, and gained three roommates. Who are they to me now? Strangers who share more with me than most. We’ve surprisingly ended up here together. And other than that, my best friend lives here too. Finally I’ve joined her in Toronto. She’s shared her friends with me, and we’ve been exceptionally social for two nervous girls. I’ve joined a volleyball team (not sure how that happened), I’ve made new friends, and I’ve allotted plenty of time for socialization. Overall, I can’t quite handle it.

Luckily school, even with it’s landslide of assignments, is there to keep me structured. Without it I fear I’d fall apart. Every day, when I wake up to the plans I made, I’m washed over with a sense of regret. Where did all the me time go? Now I spend that time in the library, yearning to make my father proud and my teachers cream their pants over my never-before-seen dedication. But otherwise I lay in bed, overcome with dread. When will my mind quiet. It can’t possibly stop thinking of all the things I have to do, of all the things I shouldn’t have said, of all the ways I’ve surely embarrassed myself.

This is what socialization does to me. And why I’m so adverse to it. It also most likely explains my avoidance of sticking around. When I’m less than permanent, so is my presence in people’s mind. And vice versa, each new person I meet washes away the memories of the others. Until they become faint and glow like a beacon of my old happy times.

I’m glad to move through the world mostly on my own. I feel a sense of serenity when I spend time alone. There’s no one to question what to do next, no one to impress, no one to appease. I’m simple in my ways. I know what I like. That is until I spend so much time alone that I seem to loose touch with reality. I drive myself crazy, talking to myself until every thought corrupts. Then I’m just lonely. Sometimes the feeling can be embraced. And other times I’m forced to end my optional solitary confinement and seek out joyous connection.

I swing between my clawing desire for independence and my deep need for someone to lean on. The pendulum has never settled.