Learn How To Embrace Your Loneliness And You Won’t Feel It Anymore

Do it. Be alone. Go on solo adventures. Learn more about yourself, and who you are. Learn there is more to you than you thought possible. Realize you are whole and complete, in this society that makes you believe you are only half a person. That you should be searching for that “soulmate,” for “the one” who will complete your incomplete heart.

Your heart is whole and wholly your own. Don’t pass time with someone out of loneliness. Don’t use other people as distractions from your own unhappiness. Don’t start seeing someone simply to have company. So you don’t have to sleep alone. So you have someone to text.

Don’t use other people as medicine. Instead, learn not to poison yourself.

Acknowledge those lonely 3 a.m. thoughts. Acknowledge the aching void. Acknowledge when it feels like there’s a black hole where your heart should be. Feel it. Don’t push it down. But do not make a home of pain. Don’t even make a vacation home of pain. Only think of pain as something that visits you. Do not make pain a permanent house guest.

Think of it as something knocking on your door, standing in your foyer, refusing to leave until you learn what it has to teach you. Because pain is the ultimate teacher. And once you learn from it, and learn who you are on your own, you are ready.

Once you know your flaws, change what you can, and accept what you can’t, you are ready. Once you know how to enjoy coffee shops, movie theaters, and trips to the coast on your own, you are ready. Once you reflect on what you’ve done wrong in the past, and figure out how not to repeat that in the future, you are ready. Once you enjoy being alone you are ready to maybe… not be alone.

Because, in the wise words of Kahlil Gibran: “Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed, For love is sufficient unto love.”