there’s a trend on youtube where youtubers post videos in series titled “living alone diaries” or some variation thereof, where they post about their daily lives living alone in some metropolitan area. in my corner of the algorithm, they are often young women (in their twenties, maybe early thirties), either full-time content creators or software engineers or in some part of tech, and i think the vlogs are meant to be relatable and/or comforting and/or inspiring.
i don’t know what i feel about them. i mostly kind of just feel old and a little duped; many of these people living alone still have partners.
i’m turning forty at the end of this year, and, while i didn’t feel much about turning thirty, i feel like shit thinking about turning forty. for most of my life, i honestly thought i’d be dead by suicide by thirty, so this whole past decade feels like it was borrowed time — and it feels exhausting and lowkey disheartening to think about, that i am still here in this middling existence a whole extra ten years later. add to that that i still don’t have a career, don’t have a partner, don’t have a family, and, while i know in my head that none of this says much about me as a human, i don’t really believe that — i haven’t met any of the major milestones that we think of in adulthood, in life, and i feel like shit because of it.
it doesn’t help that i am back in law school at this age, that i am at least a decade older than probably 75% of my class, that i will be taking the bar at the ripe age of forty-one. i don’t feel like my brain is slower because of my age, though, and there are definitely advantages to being older — school isn’t my life, and i have professional experience under my belt. i know my age also works against me in ways; i really want to intern and work in korea; and koreans are even weirder about aging women (and, just, aging humans) than americans can be.
the thing, though, is that i am at a very different point in life than pretty much everyone i know who’s around my age. all my friends are either married or partnered. they’re settled in their careers. they can plan for international trips and go out for nice dinners and do things, and they have someone in their lives with whom to plan a future together, to hope for things together, to watch TV shows together, plan trips together, run errands together.
they have someone to go home to.
i realized last year that i basically shut down any advice or commentary about loneliness or singleness from anyone who has a partner or spouse, and that might be a character flaw and/or narrow-minded stubbornness on my part, but it’s unfortunately one i just don’t foresee changing any time soon. my relationship with my loneliness and solitude has shifted over the last twenty-some years, and i’ve learned how to be alone, not because i’ve ever enjoyed my loneliness but because i have refused to let my aloneness stop me from doing things i want to do, whether it’s a movie i want to see, a restaurant i want to try, a country i want to backpack through. in many ways, i am very good at being alone, solving problems alone, killing bugs alone, and there are parts of my singleness i do relish — i don’t need to think about another’s wants or quirks when traveling, and i can plan to move to korea once i’ve graduated from law school and taken the bar because i don’t have someone else’s opinions to weigh. i don’t need to be anywhere i don’t want to be.
there’s the flip side to that, though, namely my inability to lay down roots. i don’t know how to be in one place, to want to be in one place, because being in one place reminds me that i am alone. as much as i love being amongst friends in new york, staying in that city for too long reminds me that everyone has someone to go home to but i do not. they have a reason to stay in that city, to call it home, while i can leave at any point because i have no one to hold me there — i have no one in new york or anywhere to call me home, except maybe goms.
2024 was a year of many transitions, but it was a year marked by solitude and loneliness. the beginning of august to mid-october felt impossibly difficult and alone as i had to transition from working full-time to being a student full-time, from hopping between two cities to being in one, and it sucked. it marked a significant break in my regard for new york city as home, as well as a shift in how i thought about friendships — which is not the same as how i view my friends, who are amazing people. it isn’t their fault i’m single or that there are circumstances that perpetuate the singleness or that i made shitty decisions as a young adult and am in the position professionally i am now, just like it is good that they have their own people and lives and, even, problems.
what i mean, really, is that i had become very emotionally dependent on friendships over the last few years and that 2024 showed me that maybe i need to do that less, that it isn’t fair for me to put so much of a burden on other people, that, in the end, it would be wiser for me to learn to be okay with being alone again.
i think a lot about a scene in the drama 사이코지만 괜찮아 (it’s okay to not be okay). ko munyoung (seo yeji) grew up isolated and lonely because of her mother, and, as an adult, she finds a family for herself with the moon brothers (sangtae, played by oh jung-se, gangtae, played by kim soohyun). they grow close, munyoung and sangtae bickering and fighting like siblings, gangtae, their patient and indulgent younger brother (and munyoung’s love interest), and, after they’ve settled into their camaraderie, they learn that munyoung’s mother murdered the their mother.
consumed by guilt, munyoung tries to retreat back into her shell and tries to push them away. she’s been alone before. she can go back to being alone.
gangtae patiently tells her that, no, she won’t be able to do that. she’s learned what it’s like to have a full belly.
it’s okay to not be okay is one of the few dramas that i love on a deep, personal level because it resonated so strongly with me. munyoung’s loneliness, in particular, the way she was isolated and socially stunted as a young person, the prickly, loud exterior she shows the world, the need she has buried as deep within herself as she could out of self-protection, the relief she feels at finding people who feel like her own, and the terror and pain of potentially losing that — i understand that.
i think i have long been afraid that gangtae’s words are true — and, yes, to a degree, they are. solitude is hard when you’ve tasted social warmth. it might be harder had i maybe dated someone, so, at least, there is that. 2024, though, i guess, at least showed me that i’m not going back to the extreme of the solitariness that marked my twenties, when i would often go days without physically talking to someone. there are good people in my life who are in my life, but it would serve me to learn to be okay with the silences that remain, with going home to a dark, empty apartment, with not being in one place long enough to be reminded of what i am missing. it is, after all, not the burden of the people in my life to make me feel less alone.
i go back to new york city this weekend after a month in los angeles. i already don’t want to be there, and i already miss my dog, and the only thing that takes the edge off this is knowing i’ll be back in LA in a month — then again in march, april, and may. i plan to apply only for summer internships in LA or seoul. i’m trying not to think about the age thing, but it weighs on me, my failures, my middling existence — and maybe that’s why i sit here typing out these words even while i ask myself why i’m writing all this shit down. this is the only thing i know to do with my loneliness, to write it out, to throw it out into the void and hope that someone sees it and sees themselves and feels a little less alone. it is difficult and painful to be a solo human in the world, to do more than just live alone, and i’m not going to sit here and lie and say that it’s all worth it because i find living exhausting, but i don’t know — i guess if there is something this dumb life has taught me, it’s that i am not unique, so what i feel and how i struggle are also not unique to me, so here’s a bat signal that maybe calls out to someone, hey, you, too? because, yeah, me, too.
