hedgehog-moss:

If you genuinely enjoy being alone, do you ever wonder if it is an inherent part of your character or if it stems from feeling inescapably lonely in the first place until you taught yourself to enjoy the peace and happiness one can find in solitude? what if the reason you now prefer & choose solitude at every turn is because you were a very lonely child, or teenager, not by your own choice, and that’s how you learnt to thrive and grow, so you no longer know if you can do that around people? There might also be an element of personal pride, an unconscious “you can’t fire me I quit” point when your brain decided to switch your feelings about solitude from distress to relief. I often find myself defending my love of being alone, to people who worry that I can’t possibly be happy to live in an isolated house in the woods; I insist that I do! I really do specifically enjoy the isolated factor and chose to live here because of it, but then I wonder how to differentiate an ingrained love of solitude from an acquired ability to thrive off unchosen loneliness, to learn from it and be nourished by it; to what extent it might be a form of contentment built on a bedrock of resignation.