I like to do things alone (specifically I also enjoy traveling alone, wandering new places alone, going to bars and reading alone). Has there ever been a time in your life when doing things alone was scary? If so, how did you overcome it? Or, conversely, has there been a time in your life when you weren’t able to get adequate time alone, and how did you handle that?

– from Annie

I’m a white male born into the middle class who was 5'8" at 14 and hasn’t seem 200 lbs on the scale since he’s 16. Given all that, I am not sure I’ve ever really felt fear being alone. I vaguely remember having a little bit of fear the second time I traveled to Israel in 2009? I was joining a group, but I had to leave a day or two later than everyone else. I had been to Israel before and at that time had enough conversational Hebrew 1 (and English is commonly spoken) that I wasn’t terrified, but the logistics of finding people I didn’t know without a working cell phone getting off a long flight at an odd time definitely generated some anxiety if not fear.

Of course, everything was completely fine, and I actually don’t remember the fear or anxiety all that clearly. What I do remember is the joy I felt after taking a long ride and meeting up with the group.

I now need to take a bit of a context digression…

This trip was run by a sect of Orthodox Judaism that does significant outreach, especially on college campuses, to non-religious Jews in an attempt to bring them to Orthodoxy. While I had no intention of becoming an Orthodox Jew, I had long enjoyed the intellectual and study elements of Judaism. I continued Hebrew school past my bar mitzvah through high school. I wanted to understand the religion, its philosophy and ethics. The textualism and legalism of Judaism appealed to me, and I enjoyed meeting with students once a week to learn more about how Orthodox Judaism differed from my own. Although I studied chemistry in college, I also mistakenly made it 2/3s of the way to a Judaic Studies major as well. I took a class called Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the archaeology department. I took a course on the history of Jewish diaspora into the Middle Ages– covering from roughly the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem through the 1400s in the history department. I took an anthropology course about the formation of Israeli culture and contemporary issues. I took these courses in departments that were not Jewish studies, but they were all cross listed. I didn’t even realize that my embarking on a walk of various humanities disciplines that I was doing so with a topical focus. In many ways, I saw participation in more religious learning as a rounding out to all these other interests.

A free trip to Israel was available to those who attended these learning sessions. My university had very little participation, but the University of Pennsylvania had an incredibly popular program. So I was joining “their” trip.

One more bit of context– I was taking this particular trip directly after finishing my bachelor’s degree. I was going to return three weeks later and immediately start a fifth year master’s program in a completely different subject area. My life was in major transition, and I wasn’t ending college at my happiest. I was an adult at a moment of, not crisis, but a deep unmooring.

Ok, back to the main story.

I think I knew this before I got there, but one of the folks who was on the UPenn side of the trip was a friend from high school. She was one of my first girlfriend’s younger cousins. We got to know each other when we shared a science research class that spanned grade levels. I hung out with her a few times in high school and always felt a connection with her. I don’t think we would have dated if not for her cousin, but I do think we might have gotten quite a bit closer without that awkwardness (we met mostly after that relationship fizzled with quite a bit of ongoing teenage angst and drama). I hadn’t seen her for at least 3 or 4 years at this point, probably since I had graduated high school– she would have been maybe 16.

When I arrived, she was the first person who saw me. She ran up and gave me a huge hug, dragged me to her friends, and we sat and had a couple of drinks.

The reason I know I was anxious or afraid to be alone on this trip is because I know how it felt to see a familiar face and how it felt to be embraced by an old friend. We spent a lot of time together that trip, and I remembered how we had always had an easy friendship. It was a comfort over all those weeks.

It is the feeling of belonging and presence that stands out in contrast with the feeling of being alone that stuck with me.

Nowadays, this story feels like it doesn’t fit. While I was always someone who needed time alone to process (I was very much the stereotypical teenager who closed the door to his room and stayed there alone for a long time when I needed to), I think I’ve settled into even greater independence as I’ve gotten older. I love traveling alone. I take great comfort and restoration in walking around a new place on my own. Some of my best adult memories are from the trips I took myself. And yet.

Loving alone time is not the same as being alone. And sometimes we don’t realize that we have allowed our need for alone time to shift into convincing ourselves we are alone. The special people in our lives, those we really connect with for whatever reason, can be a powerful pillar to steady ourselves against in those moments.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I saw my friend. She ended up becoming observant and marrying an Orthodox man just a couple of years later. That made the opportunities we would have to cross paths drop to nothing, and it would have made actively pursuing an ongoing friendship pretty disruptive for her. She is still someone I think about from time to time, wondering if she’s happy with her choices and doing well.

I don’t think I really answered the question, but I think I touched on the spirit of the ask. For some reason, this is the story I felt like telling today about being alone. It’s really a story about not being alone at all.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

  1. Virtually all gone. ↩︎