Flirting with solitude
I’ve been spending a lot of time alone.
First, there was 2019, when I travelled around South East Asia by myself for the best part of a year. Then of course there was last year, where I had little choice, and travelled almost exclusively from the couch to the bed to the bottle shop to the fridge. Now, here I am in 2021, conducting what I’m beginning to see as a series of anti-social experiments. Let me fill you in.
I brought in the new year with a gathering of twenty almost-complete strangers, one of whom I had met on the internet in the breakout space of a Zoom workshop called something like: ‘Happiness: An Introduction’. We kept in touch, and she invited me to join her and a crew of like-minded spiritual folk to celebrate the dawn of a new year with three days of meditation, journaling, bushwalking and a cacao ceremony. I slept in a tee-pee style glamping tent and didn’t drink a drop of alcohol. I sang, I danced alone in the dirt under the moonlit cliffs of the Grampians, and only infinitesimally rolled my eyes when one of the ‘leaders’ told me he had drunk his own piss in response to me asking about his most intense spiritual experience. I set an intention word for 2021: Spontaneity.
Then I took myself out, into the city. I luxuriated in crisp white hotel sheets, drank cocktails on rooftops while I read, ate takeaway Chinese food in front of a window eighteen stories high, my feet resting on the cool glass separating me from the glittering city lights. I walked alone along streets I had once trotted down in heels, ready to embrace the promise of night with a gaggle of girls. I walked past buildings that, once-upon-a-time, housed my favourite bars and nightclubs. Places where I had stood smoking cigarettes, talking coyly to some boy. Places where I lined-up, shivering and self-conscious and full of longing.
I signed up for a three-day, two-night pack-hike with strangers on the app, Meet Up. Having done some distance walking in the past, and recommenced my gym membership after much umming and ahhing earlier this year, I thought I’d fare fine. I was wrong. It turns out the ‘peaks trail’ is quite literally full of peaks; many of them incredibly arduous to traverse, particularly when the two strangers have scaled Everest base-camp, Patagonia and a thousand kilometres of the Camino between them. I was ill-prepared with no device to treat my drinking water, and no matches to light my stove. I could feel the polite exasperation of the strangers every time they had to wait for me. My body felt too big, and my lungs too small. But I could put up my own tent, and I was grateful for it, throwing my aching limbs inside as cloudy, starless night rolled in.
One unassuming Sunday afternoon I spontaneously attended a social gathering for people with a penchant for fetishes and kinks, people from the BDSM community at a bar in Brunswick. I was running late, trying on clothes and tossing them to the floor, unsure of what a person ought to wear to something like this. I circled the block, eyes feverishly scanning the sides of the road for a car park. When I did park, several blocks away, I was almost 15 minutes late. As I galloped along the pavement of Lygon street, sweating, I considered that maybe this dalliance was too ‘out there’, and that maybe this was a sign I should just get back in my car and piss off home. I didn’t though; I climbed the stairs to the second story of the pub and found myself seated around a sticky wooden table with four incredibly kind, open, very nerdy men. We had conversations that spanned everything from latex masks to hot chips. I felt a shifting, a sense of relief; talking about sexuality with complete strangers is truly liberating.
What exactly is it that I’m doing here? Why am I taking these excursions? Plunging myself into the physically uncomfortable, the sordid? Trying to thrust and squeeze myself, or coil my way into worlds that have never before been accessible, or even apparent to me? I guess, like others who have found themselves drifting, alone, in their thirties, I am searching for connection and for meaning; yes, that is certainly part of it. There is also a sense of boundary pushing. Of confronting fears and proving I can do… it. Am I really looking for connection with others, or simply seeking to understand myself? How to be with myself, be alone with myself. I have often heard meditation instructors or psychologists tell me that I need to ‘sit with myself’. I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood what the fuck this actually means. At the moment, it’s recognising that even when I am surrounded by others, by noise and the stimulation of life, it is ultimately me, alone.
And maybe that’s okay?
