Alonement: How to be alone and absolutely own it by Specter Francesca

Author:Specter, Francesca [Specter, Francesca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

That safe, reassuring feeling that you are exactly where you should be right now

The goosebumps you get when, for instance, you perfect playing a piece of music, or create something beautiful

The intense excitement flowing through you when you talk about the ‘thing’ you’re passionate about

The burst of creativity that comes out of nowhere, throwing up inspiration that never occurred to your conscious brain

Prioritising your thing

You know that person who always says, ‘Oh I’d love to do X,’ but instead fills up their calendar with back-to-back social activities? Don’t be that person. Finding your thing is, put simply, a case of allocating time for yourself to find it. Equally, if you have a passion or an interest in something already, you have to dedicate time to pursuing it. You would be hurt if a friend or partner never spent any quality time with you, so don’t show this apathy towards your passions, either. OK, so we know it isn’t a case of spending a couple of hours alone and suddenly your dreams come true; alonement is the time for you to identify your thing and actively take steps to start doing it. As we’ve established, time alone is time dedicated to you, and by extension it should be devoted to your thing, too, whether or not you know what it is yet. A good starting point is by daring to make space for it in your life.

On a practical level, getting comfortable with being alone is useful for trying out a new passion. If you don’t feel confident enough to, say, enter a room of unfamiliar people by yourself – whether that’s a boxing gym or a ballet class – it’s likely you will miss out on doing a whole lot of activities that may, potentially, be your thing. My friend Amy, who became hooked on boxing six years ago, considers her twice-weekly group training sessions a ‘non-negotiable’ (the instructor calls her the most committed member). Carving out ‘non-negotiable’ alonement time for myself was what got me out of the endless cycle of feeling like a writer but not actually doing much writing. Thanks to my New Year’s resolution to spend more time alone, I ended up having a lot more time to write outside of my day job on an editorial team. In the Saturday mornings I ring-fenced for myself, in the hours before bed when I switched off my phone, in the weeknights I refused to spend with people I didn’t know very well, I found the time to write what morphed into a 100-odd page document of ‘random notes’ containing the rudiments of this very book.

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