Living alone diaries - Learning to live alone in my 30’s

When my best friend and I decided that the time was right to move on and no longer live together two things went through my head. The first - how much I was going to miss her. The second? What happens if I fall down the stairs and nobody finds my broken body until several weeks later, by which point I would have probably melted into the carpet.

Despite feeling as though I had fallen behind my peers, waiting until the ripe old age of 33 to live by myself, I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

I’d never lived alone before.

For the past 10 years I had been used to having someone to go home to. Whether it was a student house full of exhausted paramedic students, or the safety of my best friend waiting to debrief the day with me. As a student, though the house fully lived up to expectations - mould in the bedrooms, a kitchen so cold you could see your breath and our back garden being turned into a skip by a nearby building site - the house was always busy. We spent a lot of time on placement so there were always people coming and going, always someone to debrief with about the crazy jobs we’d been to, or to lay in various states of exhaustion with on the gross sofas in our tiny lounge.

Coming home to an empty house has been different and has taken a little getting used to but it’s definitely not lonely. There’s a peace to coming home and finding it exactly as your left it. There’s no washing in the washing machine that needs hanging out, there’s no dishes cluttering the countertop and best of all, there’s no thread all over the house (my best friend liked to sew, so the carpet became a thread graveyard). In all honestly though, these are the things I miss about living with someone else. The evidence of them. Their little quirks and characteristics become a part of the home you’ve made.

But living alone has allowed me to take comfort in the quiet. It’s teaching me how to decompress alone and how to find peace in the solitude. My space is entirely my own and some days when I come home I can just breathe knowing that I have nobody else to worry about. It’s just me and I have the ultimate freedom to do and live as I please. It’s allowing me to get to know parts of myself I hadn’t met yet. And to actually undertake DIY which previously, had always been my friends unofficial job as she was a lot handier than I am (I say this, with photographic evidence of her tying our fence back together with cable ties).

Sure, there are times when the quiet feels a little too loud, but I know myself well enough now to understand how to move through those moments. And yes, I have to be on top of everything now, all the responsibility is mine rather than shared but I like the independence this has given me. I am proving that I can take care of all aspects of my life… mostly. The bins might not always get put out…

But ultimately, the best thing about living alone is how grounding it is to open my front door and step into the space I’ve created for myself. The small ordinary moments of living alone bring the same comfort as the knowing that my best friend was pottering around downstairs. A quiet reassurance just in a different form.

It’s safety, only now it comes from me.