I Learned That Being Alone and Being Lonely Are Completely Different Things

I had moved to Jaipur at 22 for a job and had, over the following two years, built a social life with the particular energy of someone who was not entirely comfortable being alone and was therefore quite motivated to ensure they rarely were.

I filled evenings with plans and weekends with activity and measured the quality of a week partly by how little time had been spent without company. This was not unpleasant - I had good friends and I was genuinely social by disposition. But underneath the fullness was an avoidance I was not quite conscious of.

Being alone, when it happened, had a quality I would have described as loneliness - a discomfort I associated with absence and that I had responded to, for most of my adult life, by immediately filling the absence. I had never tested whether the discomfort was actually loneliness or was something else wearing its name.

The test arrived not through any philosophical decision but through a practical one: a period at 25 when my closest friends in the city were all travelling or occupied for a period of about three weeks simultaneously, and my social calendar, for the first time in years, had wide unscheduled gaps in it.

The first week I managed the discomfort by making less natural plans with people I was less close to - essentially filling the gap rather than sitting with it. The second week I ran out of people to do that with and spent three evenings alone in my flat with no particular plan.

The first of those evenings was uncomfortable in the way I had always expected alone time to be - a restless, ambient distress that felt like something was missing. The second was different.

I read for two hours and then cooked something slow and then sat on my balcony and noticed that the distress had been replaced by something quieter and considerably more pleasant. The third evening I looked forward to.

I discovered in those three weeks that what I had been calling loneliness was actually unfamiliarity with solitude - a discomfort with the absence of external input that was entirely separate from any real absence of connection. Real loneliness, I came to understand, is about the quality of your relationships when they are present.

Solitude is simply time without company, and its quality depends almost entirely on your relationship with yourself.