A blog post by Elena Overfield | Formerly Pepetoe

There is something very strange about the fact that I can sit in an office in the morning and casually excavate twenty years of emotional baggage before I’ve finished my coffee. I take 20 minutes each morning when I’m down in London to journal, and recently it has been helping a lot.

I’ll journal about abandonment, relationships, things I’ve done wrong, my eating disorder, childhood, rejection. All the really light stuff, I guess (not). I’ll be honest here too – I do use Chat to help with this, as it knows all of this about me already. Yes I know I should probably go back to my therapist, but AI does have a way of helping you figure out things about yourself that you almost know but not quite yet. As I said, it’s been helping a lot, and I feel like I’ve grown a lot within myself over the past few months.

Yet, despite all of this journalling and “getting my life back together”, the nighttime still arrives, and one slightly sad thought can feel like somebody has placed a concrete slab on my chest. Everything becomes heavier. With this, I’ve started wondering whether I’ve misunderstood what I mean when I say: “I hate being alone.”

Maybe I don’t hate being alone

Maybe instead I hate what happens when everything else goes quiet. During the day, there’s somewhere for my brain to go, whether it’s work, people, messages, tasks, noise. Then the night comes, when people go home, messages slow down, plans finish, there isn’t a meeting in half an hour… there’s just me.

Unfortunately, my brain has apparently saved fourteen unresolved emotional issues specifically for this occasion!

Other people make me feel safe

I’ve realised how much another person’s presence can regulate me. A text means somebody is there, someone wanting to see me means I’m wanted, someone physically beside me means I’m not alone. Especially when you carry a fear that people might leave, those things become incredibly powerful. They’re not simply “nice”. They become evidence of safety. So, when everybody becomes unavailable, my brain can interpret their absence as something much bigger than “everyone’s gone to bed” – it can feel like “I’m on my own with this now.”

Nighttime me doesn’t need to solve what morning me can handle

This has been a surprisingly practical lesson. I don’t need to perform deep emotional surgery on myself at midnight. There are thoughts that feel absolutely catastrophic at night that I can look at the next morning and think: Oh. That’s what we were losing our fucking minds about?

Fatigue changes things. Darkness changes things. Isolation changes things. So, I’m learning that not every thought deserves immediate investigation. Sometimes the healthiest response is “we’re not solving this tonight”. Write it down. Sleep. Come back tomorrow. That’s not avoidance; it’s knowing when I actually have the capacity to process something.

Independence doesn’t mean needing nobody

I used to think the ultimate goal was becoming someone who was completely fine alone. Someone who didn’t need reassurance. Didn’t need company. Didn’t need anyone. I don’t think I want that anymore. Over the past few years I’ve heard it a lot from my family that “Ellie hates being alone,” “she always needs a boyfriend,” “she can’t stay home alone without inviting a friend over”. And all those other things that over time has become an inner belief of mine.

Here’s the thing. Humans need people. I love connection. I love loving people. I love having someone beside me. So, with me, it’s not about learning to not need people. It’s ok that I crave social interaction, even attention. But the thing I struggle with, and in fact have been working on, is the idea that I love having people around, but I need to be ok when they’re not.

This is a very different kind of independence. Perhaps learning to be alone isn’t learning to enjoy an empty room. Perhaps it’s learning that when everybody else leaves the room, the person I’m left with is somebody I can trust.