how to be alone

Just finished posting all my documentary-ing pictures of first.semester.of.college on facebook. Still trying to recover from the too-many hours spent captioning, rotating, organizing, explaining. Obviously unable to form complete sentences as of yet.

Haha actually I'm just trying to refrain from using so many I statements.

Looking through this semester in the pictures I took, documenting everything, really made these past few months seem like "my" semester. Gave me some weird sense of ownership over this experience that hundreds of first year UVA students had this fall-winter too, but was also amazingly, magically, unique to each person. Haha I know it shouldn't seem like magic that "everyone had a unique experience," because, well, ...duh everyone lived something different, but I don't know - it seems kind of magical to me, all these different perspectives lived and sights seen and pictures taken by so many different people put in the same place, living the same sorts of experiences in terms of the big-general stuff.

And it turns out that my first semester at college was full of solo adventures. Exploring the Rotunda in search of a bathroom ending up in a symmetry photoshoot, sun-basking in the amphitheater because the warm stone steps are the best for warming up cold bodies, library hopping, walking everywhere and wasting substantial amounts of time in transit to far-away places like the Corner and the hospital. It's not that I didn't want to hang out with people - I actually spent a lot of time doing useless things with other people too, and it seems that you're never really "alone" on a college campus anyways. It's that I just happened to spend a lot of time with myself, and in doing this one day even discovered my intro-extroverted self (hah).

So the conclusion is: "being alone," for all the subtle social insecurities the phrase may be stuck with, isn't a bad thing. Haha let's be active about it: lots of times, being alone is good - even preferable to having your moment full of people and voices. Enjoying alone time doesn't mean you're antisocial or independent in an off-putting way like a cat. So don't be insecure girl and work dat up-do! (Woah sorry for being so bossy)

Here are some helpful tips to begin with, because I'm really no expert and because she can say it so much better:

Happy alone-ing! Haha for all my talk of casting off socially-placed insecurities and labels it still sounds a little depressing. It shouldn't though! Hopefully the video convinces you, too - it's really nice.