How to Be Alone

So, back in early April, when we were still only a few weeks into lockdown in New York, a friend of mine asked me what things were like on Planet Bim. It was a joke, but it was one of those accurate jokes. Because living alone right now is probably not that dissimilar to being a far away, solitary planet.

New York was one of the first places to lock down. And in a way, I'm still living like it's March. I work from home. I leave for groceries. I attend almost no social functions.

And it's not that I don't know how to be alone. Being alone, even in a crowd, is not new to me. We moved continents when I was very young, living between the UK and Nigeria. I went off to boarding school when I was 10 years old. I left home for university when I was 19, and I never really moved back home again.

I've lived in London, Lagos, Berlin, and now New York. I chose to live in those last two places, to move far away from family and home. But there's something different about the aloneness of right now.

COVID-19 has taken away that element of choice. Like a 9-year-old being sent up to her room as punishment, versus sitting in her room, quietly reading anyway. The activities are the same, but the issue is control. So many of us have been dealing with this enforced aloneness a lot more since the pandemic began.

Sometimes I feel like I'm floating through space, a sort of dwarf planet in a galaxy that seems to be populated by planets with people attached-- children, a partner, other family members, maybe even housemates or a pet. I have none of those things at the moment. My family, my parents, my siblings, their partners, they're all in London, about three and a half thousand miles and a full ocean away.

新闻来源：This American Life