WITHOUT YOU I'M NOTHING
What do we want, when we want to be alone?
This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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My favourite times of solitude are filled with other people. Moving through a busy airport, sitting upstairs on a London bus, darting through the backstreets of a foreign city with my earphones in, I’m in the world but detached from it, alive but invisible. My invisibility makes me not-quite-alive, in some peculiarly life-giving way. I am a happy ghost.
Childfree and with a wife whose job often takes her out of the country, I’m comfortable in my own company. Perhaps too comfortable. It’s not that I don’t miss Farrah when she’s far away: we talk on the phone every day. It’s just that everything becomes calmer when I’m the only human presence in this house. The world stops zig-zagging and takes on a steady, soothing hum. You fall into that hum. It carries you through the day and into the evening and wraps around you at night as you sit alone before the flashing light of the television. It’s there to scoop you up when you wake in a silent bedroom, curled into one side of your half-empty bed. When the phone rings or there’s a knock at the door, the hum is interrupted, and it feels almost painful, like your skin has been broken.
Are we ever truly alone? It doesn’t feel that way. There’s a sense in which we’re always with ourselves. We observe our own behaviour, responding to ourselves with jabs of feeling, and sometimes even words of encouragement or admonishment. There’s a lot to see. We are not in control of our thoughts. They bubble up from our subconscious, the end result of impossibly complex neural processes of which we have no awareness. Similarly, our decisions about how to act are the end result of the democracy of clashing subsystems deep in the brain; we do whatever they decide we do. And all the while we watch ourselves, and feel our own feelings, and the watching and the feeling and the interior narration that ties it all together somehow creates a story that we simultaneously are and observe.
Is this what we mean, when we say we seek solitude to ‘find ourselves’? We want to spend time with our selves, studying who we are in all our surprising shapes and weathers. Perhaps we hope to find hidden depths, or to think our way to the ultimate source of all our failure and unhappiness, and thereby repair it. Maybe we want to seek and correct stubborn errors of thought that are causing us problems. The psychiatrist Dr Anthony Storr (no relation) argues that “the capacity to be alone… enables men and women to get in touch with their deepest feelings; to come to terms with loss; to sort out their ideas; to change attitudes.”