Alone Time Doesn’t Always Look Like This

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have, it’s just not here. I’ve been posting longer essays on Instagram. I’ll repost some of my favorites from there here too. Here’s the first. You can scroll down to see the full text in this post, if you don’t feel like reading it on Instagram.

Alone time doesn’t always look like this. More often than not, it’s faded, crumpled, tattered even. And not in artful, Instagram-worthy ways. But it’s important.

We need tough love and the people who give it to us, especially if you, like me, find it hard to keep your head on straight in the throes of powerful emotion. People like us, we also need the gentle balm of those who tell us, it’s okay to grieve, that it’s fine to be sad even if it’s not logical, to ache even if we were forewarned, even if we should have known better.

And finally we need to meet ourselves, in our rawest forms. It doesn’t have to happen immediately. Me, I have an inbuilt safety valve that lets me tuck away my messiest self deep down till I reach a time and place that I can take it out and face it, safely. And that must happen. A time when no other commitment or duty or person must intrude. Nothing else allowed to be more important than your own feelings which must be faced with no voices of the world interfering.

And that is the time when you’ll realise the ugliness is not you or in you. All you are, is a witness to the world and occasionally, a reflection of it. Reflections pass. You will, too. Watch it alone.