A Full Emptiness

What is to be said about being alone? Not in a global, philosophical sense, nor in a self-depricating sense; simply in spending time solitarily.

I'm suddenly hesitant to use the term "spending time with oneself," because it seems like that phrase feels defensive. There is much pressure, especially at college, to be opening one's world. The most available, and certainly easiest, way of doing this is to spend time with people. After all, you are surrounded by people whose lives differ from yours immeasurably, yet you inhabit the same space. I am certainly not anti-this action. Indeed, I find it meaningful myself. Quite the understatement, I know, and its merits deserve their own treatises. Spending time with oneself seems like a rebute to this pressure- I'm not alone, I'm with myself.

What is this implying? That "myself" is different from the solitary individual giving it its own time? As far as I know, I don't posess any sort of spiritual resevoir in myself that is only able to be tapped when I am alone. True, I am more focused and attentive to my thoughts and my surroundings when not being distracted with the needs of those around me.

Indeed I am a different person when nestled in my own little world, currently addressed within the dorm dubbed Elton, room 109, than when I am present outside, amongst my friends and acquaintences. The organic makeup of those differences eludes me, however. When "outside," I am the sum of (other people's assumptions and knowledge about me) and (myself in comparison to those around me). What I am in my own head and heart certainly matters, but when it comes down to it, sadly, my own existence depends wholly on the perception of others...socially speaking, of course.

So perhaps it is that which makes up the structure of those differences between the self outside and the self with whom I am currently spending the day. The fact that, at the moment, I am wholly the sum of what I believe myself to be. The moment I am face to face with another, who I am becomes who I want to be, who I want to be like, what I want to be known as. In my particular case, those two items are not radically different, but this is not so for many people.

In a way, though, the outside social world serves as a proof for the time spent alone. As I am brooding, pondering either nothing or everything, the details of details of things that may or may not affect anything, I am in need of confirmation of myself. How shall I know if I am truly what I want to be? I need other people to tell me. I am, of course, biased towards myself, as are many people, I would imagine. But if I see success coming out of this time searching, alone, for the path lost in the melange of social pressure points sprouting up in my daily life, then it also legitimizes my time spent unaccompanied. For it is in that time that I regain composure and remind myself what it is like to be me, myself, and that I remain a buoyant figure in an overpopulated, gravity-heavy ocean.

It is of course a system of checks and balances. When I am in one medium (alone or outside), I long for the other. Such, however, are the ways of life. In both cases, however, lies an unquenchable thirst for connection. To what, exactly, I wish to be attatched to and inhabit, remains elusive and transcendent.