Emily Hoeven | One's a crowd

Growing Pains | How our fear of being alone holds us back

By Emily Hoeven 09/08/15 5:50pm

This past week, I went to the One Direction concert at Lincoln Financial Field by myself. I had bought the tickets in September of last year (an embarrassing 12 months ahead of the actual performance), and at that time, I hadn’t known anyone at Penn well enough to ask if they’d want to go to a concert together. That was the response I kept giving when people found out I was going to the concert and inevitably asked, “Who are you going with?” Then I started thinking about it. Why was I trying to justify my situation? Why was I going out of my way to explain to others why I was going to an event by myself?

We don’t like the word “alone.” It’s a little too close to “lonely” and “loneliness” for comfort. It evokes that clichéd feeling of walking into a cafeteria and not having a table of friends who you immediately gravitate towards. It feels like that time in high school when it seemed like everyone had someone to give a teddy bear to on Valentine’s Day except for you. It makes us feel so self-conscious that we carry our cell phones around like safety blankets, so that if we’re ever standing by ourselves in a line or waiting for someone else to come join us, we can mitigate the sensation of aloneness by immersing ourselves in our glowing screens. We reassure ourselves that we might not have someone next to us, but we have someone to text. We’re not alone. We’re not lonely. We have friends.

But sometimes we don’t. And that in itself is one of the hardest things to admit: feeling like you do not have a solid base of friends who you can point to. We feel anchorless, drifting, floating, exposed, naked without other people around us. After all, the people we associate with help to define us, the things we like and the things we do. Alone, we have to take full responsibility for our self-representation. It’s daunting.

And even having all of the friends in the world doesn’t prevent the situation where they want to do X but you’re dying to do Y. The most predictable solution is: “Well, I don’t want to go by myself, so I guess I’ll just go with you guys.” Better to be with others and do what they want than to be alone and do what you want. This follow-the-crowd mentality recurs in texts that I’ve both sent and received before going to an event: “What are you wearing? I don’t want to be the only one wearing a dress. It’ll be awkward.”

It’s interesting, in a culture that prides itself so much on individualism, how scared we are of sticking out or diverging. We don’t really want to be individuals unless we can be them together. And to a certain extent, it makes sense. One of the most relieving things that can happen when going through a difficult experience is hearing another person say “You’re not alone. I went through that too.” We all want to feel like we fit in somewhere. We seek out friendships and relationships because there is something so inherently special about being able to share meaningful experiences with others. We derive essential feelings of belonging, worth, acceptance, and happiness from being part of a larger community. Yet I sometimes feel that in all the emphasis on building and fostering community, on connecting with others through dozens of different social media platforms, we have forgotten how to be alone — or rather, how to see being alone as something that isn’t negative. That it could, in fact, be positive.

Because after all, there is something so comforting in realizing that you can keep yourself company. That you don’t need the validation of anyone but yourself. That you don’t have to rely on a group to feel complete. That you can do things and go places even if no one else is interested in those things or places.

It is true that being alone can be lonely. But it can also be incredibly empowering. And let me tell you, seeing One Direction in concert was more than worth every askance glance I got when I told people I was going solo.

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