What if I want community but I also want to be alone?

How one text sent me spiraling (but also please don't stop texting me to hang out)

So- let’s get right into it. I got this text from a friend a few days ago and it felt like the perfect case study to the complicated tension I feel between independence and collectivism¹ these days.

Very chill text, right? On its face, it’s exactly the kind I life I say I want to have. And I think I really DO want that kind of life. One where I’m not always penciling in friend hang out weeks in advance, where I’m not squeezing a Facetime in between another call or task, where we can exist together, casually and without preparation or pretense. Where we can hang for an hour or two and then go our separate ways because we know we’ll see each other again soon. This is the idyllic life I want. The intimacy, closeness, casualness, an integration into each other’s lives as opposed to the compartmentalization that a “want to get coffee?” invitation every six months feels like.

And yet when I get that text I feel immediate resistance.

I had just gotten to a bar near my house, ordered a beer and spread out with a book. I even posted the picture on my IG, so excited to dive into what is my perfect kind of late afternoon activity.

The bar was in my neighborhood, the same area as the friend.

The friend is someone I really like. I had an afternoon with nothing to do. I was in fact, totally and utterly free. And yet when I got their text, I immediately felt things, multiple feelings at once. This feels vulnerable to me to write out if I’m being honest, because I fear I’m letting you into my anxiety, but I really want to tease this out here. It also feels vulnerable because I have IRL friends that I know follow me on here and I don’t want the message to be “don’t text me to hang out!” because that’s also not what I’m trying to get at.

Here were all the different thoughts that popped into my head (at basically the same time) when I got that text:

• I felt a feeling of “nooooo, my afternoon is ruined! I don’t want to do that”

• I felt a feeling of guilt, “oh god I’m free, I should say yes”

• I felt a feeling of shame “why don’t I want this casual hang? I always say this is the exact set up I want!”

• I felt a feeling of trying to mentally compromise “maybe I wait 10 minutes, see if they’re still around and then invite them, cuz that’ll give me a bit more alone time”

• I felt a feeling of self-judgement “you don’t need to say yes if you don’t want to. Own the fact that you don’t want to, it’s honest”

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That is… a lot. This interaction (I mean, the one between me and myself LOL) has stayed with me for a few days, because it feels emblematic of the contradiction I often experience.

The older I get, the more I realize how introverted I am. I love being alone, reading alone at a cafe, going to movies alone, walking alone. I feel perfectly at peace, comfortable, and grounded in my own company. And when people are there with me doing an activity that I would otherwise do alone, it changes the tenor of the experience, of course.

But it’s not such a simple “well, you clearly don’t want to hang out with them!” black and white for me. Because I also feel LIT UP around people. When I am with my people, I am the best version of myself. When I’m with the kinds of people that make me laugh, that get me, that ask me good questions and say things that get me curious about them, I could go for hours and hours. I leave the hang out feeling on cloud nine. Seeing a movie alone is amazing and so fun for me, but when I’m seeing a movie with the right kind of friend, it’s actively an additive experience. We can guffaw or cry together. Same with walking, sitting at a cafe and reading, traveling. I value doing things with people. But I also at my core need and love a lot of alone time.

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So what’s happening and how do I interpret all of these seemingly conflicting data points? I have a few different hypotheses but my strongest one is:

Maybe it’s about dread, transitions, and inertia.

Hear me out. Newton’s first law of motion says:

An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

One reason I can articulate for that knee jerk resistance to a friend’s spontaneous hang out request is because it’s changing the pattern of my day, pushing me into a transition, from one line of thinking, one plan I had for my day, one path, to another. And as it stands currently, my life (or rather, my brain maybe?)² is not set up to welcome this kind of journey with ease, to figure out how it fits in.

I talked about this idea of transitions, and how they’re harder for some and easier for others, in a TikTok video before³, about learning this concept from Come Together by Emily Nagowski.

Some parts of it that I think are really applicable to this situation:

Some people transition readily from task to task, from setting to setting, from role to role. But maybe you’ve spent your whole life feeling really stressed when you transition from one task to another…so when your partner presents you with a potential transition…something inside you grinds with resistance, just because of the difficulty of transitioning out of whatever state of mind you’re currently in.

If you’re slow to adapt, your first response to a partner…isn’t necessarily a no or a yes, but a sigh or a groan at the effort you know it will cost you…even though in the past you’ve almost always been really glad you made that effort.

After six years together, my partner knows that I do a whole groan-y wind-up before I hang out with friends, or Facetime with long distance friends, or anything, and he just kind of rolls his eyes— it’s “part of my process”. I used to pathologize that groan, to see the groan as telling me something: you don’t want to hang out with that person. Or even worse: you aren’t a people-person, you don’t actually want community around you (dear lord the brain tells stories!!). But I/we (my partner really helped me see this) realized that that clearly wasn’t true: because 9/10 times when I come home from said activity, or finish the friend call or whatever it is with people, I feel so glad I did the thing. I’m usually energized, feeling connected to my people or city or self or whatever. It genuinely adds richness to my life, well-being, and happiness. I love being around my friends, or saying hi to my barista, or going to the banned book club at my local bar (I did that a few weeks ago!)

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So it’s hard to know what to do what that groan/sigh feeling.

Because as mentioned, I really am predisposed to solitude and independence. I could spend a whole week alone and feel totally at peace. In fact, I need that! But I don’t see that part of the conversation on community: how to be in/around/reliant on people in a meaningful way, and also live a life that has regular periods of solitude.

I know I’m not just interested in community in the intellectual way. Because as I mentioned, when I am with my people, life is better.

So how do I know when to push through my feelings of dread, because it’s ‘just part of my process’ and when to listen to it? And how can all these feelings exist in me at the same time?!

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My sister sent me this short piece entitled “The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship”⁴. In it, they quote Gibran’s words:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

This to me really nicely touches the complicated tension of existing amongst people you love and also preserving your individuality. I want to continue to marinate on this. To challenge myself to say yes even when I feel that resistance, but then also to say no sometimes and feel truly at peace with my decision to be alone in those moments.

What do you think about this? Do you experience this sort of tension yourself or do you find this entire thing crazy? Hah! I want to hear any and all thoughts.

And if you think this would be thought-provoking for someone in your life, please do share it with them!

Miriam

1. This is my normal plug for “it’s not a binary!!” and I know I set it up as one in this post, but I think that’s because to me, it’s currently feeling like a binary in my head and I’m trying to work through why that is!

2. I wonder if this is the scenario too of, the more I do the thing (like say yes to the random text asking if I’m around) the more I start to reshape the configuration of my life, to welcome and appreciate this sort of thing. It feels almost chicken and egg, like I really believe in my soul I’m an introvert but I also know that if my life was set up to be more social, I’d probably feel differently about being social. But building it up from scratch feels so hard!

3. See it on TikTok here

4. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/27/kahlil-gibran-the-prophet-love-marriage/