On Becoming: Learning to Sit With Myself

On Becoming: Learning to Sit With Myself

Before coming to the Peace Corps, I was never alone.

Not really.

I lived with my family—doors always open, voices always drifting from room to room. Then I went to college and lived with roommates, sharing kitchens and couches and late-night conversations that blurred into early mornings. Even when I was physically by myself, I was never alone. There was always someone nearby. A presence. A hum.

Loneliness, to me, was something abstract. A warning sign. A word with sharp edges.

Lonely people were people who had been left behind. People without plans on Friday nights. People who hadn’t figured something out yet. Loneliness felt like failure—social, emotional, personal. Something to fix quickly, quietly, before it hardened into something permanent.

I thought loneliness was something to fear.

Then I moved to North Macedonia.

And for the first time in my life, I became alone in a way I had never experienced before—not unloved, not disconnected, not abandoned—but physically, unmistakably alone.

I live alone now. I eat meals alone. I walk home alone. There are days when I don’t speak out loud to another person until evening. Days when the only sounds in my apartment are the kettle clicking off or the clima clicking on.

At first, it unsettled me.

I kept waiting for the loneliness to arrive the way I had always imagined it would—heavy, aching, undeniable. I braced myself for sadness. For the sense that something was missing.

But that wasn’t what happened.

Instead, there was space.

We talk about loneliness as if it’s inherently tragic, but I’ve started to realize how much of that narrative is cultural. We’ve collapsed loneliness into isolation, into rejection, into failure—when often, it’s simply the absence of noise. An empty room we don’t yet know how to sit in.

And we are deeply uncomfortable with empty rooms.

So much of modern life is designed to keep us from being alone with ourselves. We fill silence with sound, solitude with scrolling, stillness with productivity. We learn—slowly, subtly—that being alone means something has gone wrong.

But living here has made that impossible to maintain.

There is no roommate to absorb the edges of my day. No family member to overhear my thoughts and soften them mid-sentence. No built-in audience for my routines or my moods. I don’t get to disappear into proximity.

I have had to meet myself fully.

In the beginning, that felt raw. Unsteady. Like standing in a room without furniture and wondering where to sit. But now—five months in—I can feel the shift.

At four months, solitude stops feeling temporary.

It stops being something you’re enduring until your “real life” resumes. It starts to feel like a life in itself.

I’ve noticed how my thoughts move when no one interrupts them. I’ve learned which ones circle and which ones land. I’ve learned how long it takes me to miss people—and how deeply—and also how capable I am of holding that missing without immediately reaching outward to soothe it.

Loneliness has stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like information.

It shows me where I still want distraction instead of presence.
It reveals which parts of me want attention, not escape.
It reminds me that solitude isn’t emptiness—it’s intimacy without witnesses.

There is a kind of loneliness that hurts. The kind that comes from wanting connection and not having it. I won’t pretend that doesn’t exist. But I’ve learned that much of what I once labeled as loneliness was actually fear—fear of being alone with my own inner life, without mirrors or validation.

At five months, I no longer measure my days by how full they are of people. I notice smaller things now. The way morning light hits my kitchen table. The steadiness of routines that belong only to me. The quiet confidence of knowing I can sit with discomfort and not flee from it.

I still crave connection. I still miss my people. I still feel the weight of distance in very real ways. But now that ache doesn’t feel like evidence that something is wrong.

It feels human.

Loneliness is no longer a verdict. It’s a season. A teacher. A room I know how to sit in.

Before the Peace Corps, I thought loneliness was something to escape.

Four months in, I understand it differently.

It’s something you learn to walk through slowly—until one day you realize you’re no longer afraid of the quiet. You’re listening to it. And in that listening, you’re becoming someone who knows herself more fully than she ever could in a crowded room.

With heart,