Learning to be alone

I am not an "alone" type person. Well that's not 100% true. In the big picture I don't enjoy it, in small doses, I adore it, crave it even. After a long weekend with people I love coming home to the quiet emptiness of my own home. On a daily basis, however, I hate it.

As I laid by the pool yesterday trying to soak up some sun, alone, I thought a lot about this. I thought how hard I try to NOT be alone....it's a desperate attempt to avoid being alone with my own thoughts. I engulf myself with friends, new and old, to avoid being alone. I realized yesterday that I am not really making changes in my own life as much as I am just trying to "absorb" what I need from others and thus when they move on, when they change, when they do what they need to do for themselves, I am left behind.

I feel alone, empty and sad because all I'm doing is just sort of skimming the surface of my own life and not really living. When I am not able to do that I have to find new friends, or new people to absorb energy from and it keeps changing, keeps evolving but always with the same outcome...me alone and not liking it.

I need to figure out HOW to be alone. To be with just me and be OK with it. To not rely on anyone else to fill that void, empty, hallow feeling in my soul. It's not a bad thing really, but it feels like a bad thing to me. I associate being alone with some kind of negativeness. Maybe because I think if you are alone it means no one wants to be with you....near you.....to hang out with you and you are not worthy of anyone else's time. I want to be the person people want to be with....to hang out with, to spend time with but I never feel like THAT person.

How do you learn to be alone? Why does being alone feel so negative to me? I tried yesterday to do things on my own without "needing" anyone around me. I went shopping, I sat and had coffee and then I laid by the pool with just me....no texting, not talking.....nothing. It should have been enjoyable, it should have been energizing, it should have been.....a good thing, but honestly, it did none of those things for me. Ugh. I realize it's not an overnight, flip a switch type of thing but yikes....this process is gonna kinda suck.

I know we all need to re-energize ourself, we need to go "inside" and figure out who we are and what we want but what if we don't have the capability to do that? What if you can't "go inside"? Do you just lose out? Aren't there other options? Aren't there other ways to figure it all out? There can't be just one way to do things....right?

We have to learn to be alone with ourselves, we have to learn to like who we are and if we don't, then we have to figure out how to change those things to make us become the person we can stand to be alone with. Maybe that's it.....maybe I can't stand the person I am therefore I can't be alone with me. Hard work equals success right....so if it were easy it wouldn't be worth it.