alone

I’ve spent much of the last few weeks thinking about my need for alone time. Over the years it has gotten to the point that I need more than the average person. A lot more. Last year when I was incredibly frustrated by my lack of creative productivity and just felt generally stuck, this made sense, but now that I’ve made progress on those fronts, it’s a little perplexing.

I wasn’t always like this, though. I used to hate being alone – I was a serial monogamist for years. Even the thought of having a meal by myself or going to a movie alone depressed me. Now I love doing those things. I guess this is a trait I inherited from my father, but why did it skip my siblings? My sister is at home even in the most awkward of social situations and my brother has an enormous posse of friends he’s always hanging out with. My mom thinks I was just born with it and that it took a little while to develop within me.

The other day when I was getting my hair cut (butchered, in fact), I reached that moment when the person cutting your hair stops with the small talk and just settles into the task at hand. I’ve always loved that little pocket of quiet time – you’re physical close to another person but without the expectance of conversation or prolonged eye contact, which are precisely the things I need a break from every now and then. I’m kind of like a cat, I guess – sometimes they just like to be near other people without necessarily interacting.

Looking back on different phases of my life this makes even more sense. Playing in bands for all those years, there was comfort in the sort of musical comraderie that it provided. You collectively focused on the task (gig) at hand. And even when you weren’t on stage, the music you had just played or were about to play kind of filled that conversational void and allowed for silence, if that was what you wanted. I never got nervous performing in front of two-thousand people, but I'll get anxiety speaking in front of five.

I’ve always loved doing dishes, at times insisting on doing so at other peoples’ houses. Now I understand that this has more to do with what I was avoiding than some obsession with cleaning. And my year and a half of jiu-jitsu – you can’t get physically closer to another human being without having sex, but there’s really no time for chit-chat. I guess I just need my socializing to be activity based – I love going to see music with someone or watching basketball or the UFC.

It also explains why I've taken to this whole blogging thing (even though things have been slow here lately). I'm much more comfortable communicating and formultaing my thoughts without the pressure of another person's reactions to worry about.

As much as I have allowed myself to accept that this is just who I am and that there is nothing wrong with me, I am aware that there are probably people around me who take offense at times, mistaking my distractedness or distance as a comment on them, which makes me sad.

A couple of years ago we were visiting some friends in Vegas. My friend Matt and I got up real early in the morning to beat the brutal heat and drove out to Red Rock Canyon. Matt is one of the only people I’ve ever met who needs even more alone time than I do. Like me, he’s a big fan of the activity-based hang. We crawled up and down the rocks for a while (which is called scrambling, I learned), eventually taking a break at the highest point and enjoying a spectacular panoramic view. You could see the sprawling Vegas strip fifteen miles away. We both sat staring out across the desert, enjoying a spontaneous moment of silence. It could have been two minutes, it could have been fifteen, it didn’t matter. He understood.