My Experience With Living Alone For The First Time
In the past 20 years of my life, I hardly had the chance to live alone. I always stayed with my parents, classmates, and friends. I lived in my home, dorms and an apartment with roommates. My life was covered with school and people; I’d never thought about how I could live alone.
However since I moved to LA last month, there is a big living challenge waiting for me. The difficulties of living alone are not related to problems like how to cook or how to do housework. In fact, living alone is never a course about how to do housework or keep everything in a routine. This is a course about facing loneliness and maintaining self-discipline.
At the beginning of living in LA, I felt so excited about my new life. Each week, I only need to do my internship for two days, which means I have a lot of free time to do whatever I want. I made a plan for my life including daily working out, learning English, writing scripts and so on. However, after a couple weeks of staying alone, I turned my life into a mass. My plan for a perfect life was broken down.
Except for my working days, I hardly spent time on learning courses or reading professional books. I lied on my bed and faced the ceiling hour to hour until I felt starved. Opening my refrigerator, looking at the vegetables and meat, I decided to give up cooking a healthy meal and stepped out to buy junk food.
I bought some new books but never open them. I can’t bear the quiet atmosphere in the home so I always play videos and loud sounds, which negatively influence my focus. My attention is easily dragged from learning to watching shows. However watching fun programs don’t make me really happy, I just need to hear some noise. When nights come, I lie on my bed again and can’t help reviewing the day, and I feel guilty because of doing nothing. The silence of nights and the emptiness of my heart both tell me again and again that I don’t know how to face loneliness.
That’s why I’d like to stay in the crowd, away from quiet.
However, this kind of quiet is not the same as the quiet in a literal sense. I could watch fun shows, laugh in front of my screen, or go shopping day to day to pretend that I am not alone. But the truth is that I couldn’t satisfy myself. I don’t feel any meaning in what I did, so I feel empty.
I know my feeling is not an individual situation. Many people may also meet the same problems when they start to live alone. They suddenly have freedom and a lot of time. Then, they may sit down and consider the same question as I did about what to do each day. Also, they probably feel bored, become lazy and then blame themselves.
Now, I am still adapting myself to the life and trying to change myself in a positive way.
The first thing I did was stop blaming myself and feeling guilty. Enjoying lazy time sometimes is not too bad for people’s growth. When I lie on the bed and see the sunshine through my window, I start to tell myself the lazy Sunday morning is a gift for myself, instead of being worried about my schedule. When I pretend to have a good emotion, then I do have a good emotion.
The second change I have is to go to some positive public areas. rather than staying in my home. For example, I push myself to work out in a gym by paying the high membership fee. Thus I become excited about every exercise. I go to a library or a suitable cafe to read and write. In these areas, I can see other people working hard, which basically could encourage me to follow them. The atmosphere is similar to studying with classmates.
The third thing I do is to get up early and sleep early. Because I find that the night makes people lose their mind and feel lonely. Thus, in order to reduce the lonely feeling, I’d like to reduce my evening time.
Anyway, living alone is a good chance for people to realize their weakness and grow from it.
