My drink of choice: The Ultimatum, Netflix’s latest social experiment. Shortly into episode two or three, potentially four (they make it so easy), a woman named Casey interrupts a heated discussion about nothing to declare that “there is a difference between being alone and being with yourself”.

I did not expect a sudden and dramatic existential reckoning while binge-watching normies from Nevada trade fiancés, but here we are. And there I was. Or rather, wasn’t. Nick Lachey’s voice faded into the background, and Casey’s proclamation began to itch my brain.

What is the difference between being alone and being with yourself?

There is only one physical state of “being alone”, but there are two interior experiences: loneliness and solitude. Loneliness names the pain of being alone; solitude names the glory. Useful distinction, but it’s still a description from the outside. Contraction versus expansion. What I was actually after wasn’t the vocabulary for the two states. It was an explanation of what tips you from one into the other.

As someone who requires an equal amount of me-time and quality time, I’ve experienced both the pain and the glory of being alone. But I found myself wondering: is loneliness truly about the absence of other people? For me, feeling lonely has always been less to do with whether I am unaccompanied by others, and more to do with whether I am unaccompanied by myself.

The pain of loneliness is what happens when you’re being dragged backward by the past, or yanked forward by anxiety about the future. It’s when you are reaching for something, anything, to ease it. Which is why it tends to show up most when no one else is around: it’s hard to find a distraction while you’re lying in bed at 7 p.m. waiting for your Uber Eats to arrive. Especially when they provide two sets of utensils (rude).

Thich Nhat Hanh makes a version of the same point: solitude was never about a hut in the woods. It comes from a steady heart that doesn’t get swept off by the crowd, by old grief, or by worry about what’s coming. He talks about returning to the “island of self,” the idea that there’s a stable place inside each of us, and that loneliness is largely what happens once we’ve lost the map back to it. So, basically, Hanh agrees with me: loneliness doesn’t get solved by adding more people to the room.

And for a brief literary interlude: let the record show that nobody in the history of literature has ever described solitude as comforting. It’s always vast, or an island, or a room you have to fight for. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf argues that a woman needs a locked door and five hundred pounds a year before she can even begin to be alone with her own mind.

Solitude, in other words, is rarely framed as a passive default state you fall into. It’s something you have to build, defend, or crash your best friend’s family trip to Portugal to acquire.

“Being with yourself”, then, isn’t a synonym for being physically unaccompanied. It’s closer to a kind of internal company. Attention that isn’t fleeing into the past, the future, or a phone screen, but is actually staying put wherever you are.

So how can we find the joy in being alone?

How to be with yourself

Written by a girl still trying to figure out how to

Step 1: Start with a breath.

It’s tempting to meet loneliness with logic. To talk the feeling away. But, avoidance is usually the first line of defense, and it rarely works. Buddhist practice suggests something more physical and immediate instead: take a few conscious breaths. A moment to be still. Even if you feel silly doing it. Even if it’s just the few seconds between the third episode ends and fourth begins. It’s not about fixing the feeling. It’s about giving your attention something present-tense to land on.

Step 2: Ask what you’re actually trying to escape.

Next time being alone feels unbearable and your hand is already reaching for a distraction, take a beat. Usually what’s uncomfortable isn’t the silence itself, it’s a specific thought the silence suddenly made audible. Whether that thought is I’m not good enough or, simply, I’m bored, naming it tends to ease the discomfort more meaningfully than company could.

Step 3: Practice being alone in company, and in company alone.

You can rehearse non-intrusive togetherness by sitting quietly near someone without needing to fill the space. I was in good company the entire time I was in Portugal, but it was the quiet moments—reading in the same room as my best friend, a near-silent walk on the beach—that handed me the same steadiness I can reach for when no one else is around. Turns out I was practicing being with myself while being with someone else long before my existential reckoning ever showed up.

Step 4: Treat solitude as a place you return to, not a state you achieve.

The “island of self” framing helps here. Even if you’ve never read a word of Hanh’s teachings, you’ve probably heard some version of go to your happy place. Same practice, different packaging. You don’t need to build a happy place from scratch. It already lives inside of you. The work is just remembering the way back. Some days that trip is short. Some days it isn’t. Both count.

Step 5: Let loneliness be information, not a verdict.

If time alone consistently reads as abandonment rather than rest, that’s not a character flaw. Your personality type has surprisingly little to do with the split between feeling solitude or loneliness. It’s less about introvert versus extrovert, and more about whether you’re carrying around a felt sense of being accompanied by yourself. Loneliness is never really the absence of other people. It’s the absence of your own internal steadiness: alone, and crucially, unaccompanied by your own presence too.

I did not expect a reality show to send me spiraling into a question philosophers, psychoanalysts, and Buddhist monks have been circling for centuries, but Casey said what she said, and I’ll take my epiphanies where I can get them.

If you have yet to experience true solitude, all hope is not lost. Building a steady presence is something to be practiced, not mastered. So, as you travel toward your own island of self, it’s worth extending yourself some compassion along the way. The joy of being alone can’t be conjured by sheer force of will and a Le Labo candle.

Although, I’ve found that lighting a Santal 33 votive never hurts.

A very diverse source list:

To dig as deep as your lonely heart desires

• The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, streaming on Netflix

• Thich Nhat Hanh: “the island of self” , from a 2012 Plum Village dharma talk, and the essay “Keep Your Loneliness Warm” (from Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet).

• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

By the time we got to the dive bar next door, we had graduated from favorite movies and mutual friends and let the space between us close. Despite the buzz, I felt grounded. After a four-year relationship, sitting across from someone new was both exciting and low-stakes. To him, I was just a pretty girl who wanted to get tipsy enough to make out with a stranger.

Her Origin Story

The cool girl has been with us for a while, but she got her modern name from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, in a monologue that’s been quoted so often it’s practically scripture at this point. The cool girl, as Flynn describes her, loves football and dirty jokes and burping, is a size two, and never, ever complains. She is, crucially, a character invented by men, or rather, a character women learn to perform for men, because somewhere along the way, “low-maintenance” became a personality trait worth aspiring to.

But the cool girl predates Flynn, too. She’s in every magazine profile of a starlet who insists she “doesn’t really diet, she just doesn’t think about food.” She’s in every “I’m not like other girls” Tumblr post circa 2013. She’s the girl who laughs at the joke about her ex without flinching, shrugs when plans fall through. She never seems to need anything. Not reassurance. Not commitment.

She Is Always Optimizing

That night turned into three months of something I didn’t have a name for, and for most of it, I played the part perfectly. I was the girl with no expectations. Unbothered by last-minute cancellations and slow responses. “I like that he lets me do my own thing,” I’d preach to whoever sat across from me, as though independence and indifference were the same muscle.

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about an ideal that is always optimizing. Someone who is engineered to look effortless, natural, like it costs nothing. This is the cool girl’s defining feature, and also her central lie. She appears to have arrived at her equanimity naturally, as though she simply is unbothered, rather than working extremely hard to seem that way.

This is what makes her so seductive as an identity to try on. She promises that all the exhausting parts of being a person—the wanting, the waiting, the wondering—can simply be edited out the same way you’d crop your stomach rolls out from a bikini photo. The work is doing the work invisibly.

But, like most things that look effortless, the effort doesn’t disappear just because no one can see it.

She has No Interior Life Worth Mentioning

Six weeks in, I remember the shape of his mouth as he asked if I was an anxious person, the word anxious itchy on his tongue. He studied me, sipping his drink.

“No more than the next person.” Already moving on: “So, are you a Knicks fan?”

Part of what makes the cool girl so unknowable is that she doesn’t narrate her own feelings. She doesn’t explain herself, doesn’t ask for clarification. She simply doesn’t seem to have an interior life worth mentioning, or if she does, she’s decided it’s none of your business.

The cool girl has an aesthetic of that distance. When confronted with a question that deserves a real answer, she goes quiet, and lets you assume the quiet means she’s fine.

So that’s what I did. But, I wasn’t able to stop the wondering.

Instead, I replayed that moment over and over: the way he sank into his seat as I laughed it off.

As I stared out his bedroom window that night, I thought about the bottle of Lexapro sleeping atop my vanity. 20mg, right next to my birth control and a journal filled with existential thoughts. A person with an interior life, performing a person without one.

She Cannot Want

The cool girl can drink too much, sleep with the wrong person, disappear for a weekend without explanation. All of this is permitted, even expected. What she cannot do is want a future. She cannot ask where things are going, because asking implies caring about the answer, and caring about the answer is the one thing that breaks character.

This is why “I don’t really do labels” became such a load-bearing phrase for an entire generation. Not because anyone actually believed labels were meaningless, but because wanting one was the thing you weren’t allowed to admit to. The cool girl exists permanently in the present tense. The moment she starts thinking about tomorrow, she stops being cool and starts being “too much.”

So, even as the cancellations started to hurt and the silence started to feel like rejection, I desperately clung onto the persona I had crafted. I wasn’t afraid of losing this man. I hardly knew him. But the character I was playing? Her, I knew very well. And I wasn’t ready to let her go.

She Doesn’t Exist

I knew this for certain at 2 a.m., listening to him snore, doing the math on how much longer I could play this part before I disappeared completely. Editing myself down. Removing the parts that might be too much.

The needs that had always been there suddenly felt overwhelming, not because they’d grown, but because I’d stopped pretending they weren’t there.

I woke up still exhausted, the buzz of the night before gone, the cool girl act still sitting on me like a coat I couldn’t take off. The performance was draining me, and it was never going to be enough.

Being cool was never a real option. It’s just a performance designed to make other people’s lack of effort feel like your personality flaw. And the costs far outweigh the benefits. No one has ever won an Oscar for pretending to want less, after all.

So if you have ever felt too sensitive, or “too much”, just know that the problem is never the size of your needs.

It’s the person you handed them to.

“He’s kind of cute, right?” she said, nodding toward a man at the next table. We were in a too-loud restaurant in TriBeCa. He was in a navy suit, working through a baby gem salad with the focused joylessness of someone who has never once eaten for pleasure. She mouthed no ring across the table. I thought: when did that start happening?

“I’m sorry,” she said a moment later. “I’m just trying to help.”

The worst part: she was.

There is always a distinct period after a breakup, usually around the three-or-four-month mark, when people stop asking how you’re doing and start asking who you’re seeing.

It arrives the way social pressure always does: masked, perfumed, impossible to refuse. Concern in optimism’s clothes. Panic wearing the face of tenderness. Everyone playing their part in a scene whose only purpose is to return you, as quickly as possible, to legibility.

We know what to do with heartbreak. It has a shape, a grammar, a whole aesthetic built around it: the Didion on the nightstand, the therapist who nods with practiced sorrow. Roland Barthes wrote that the lover’s discourse is one of the last spaces where a person is allowed to feel extreme—to suffer operatically, to be undone. Heartbreak lets you be the main character in a story everyone already knows how to read.

At first, heartbreak is a gift. Not a pleasant one, but a clarifying one. It gives every strange and ragged thing you do a reason. The 2am Tuesdays. The oversharing. The crying that arrives without warning, in bathrooms, in taxis, in the cereal aisle at 9am. Grief, at least, is a container. It holds you even as it undoes you.

And then something inconvenient happens: you start feeling better.

The person who once felt folded into your DNA begins drifting toward the edges of your life. Still there, but no longer sitting at the center of it. And when the heartbreak leaves, it takes with it the easiest excuse in your arsenal.

It’s no longer that you can’t open up. It’s that you don’t want to. And there’s no Phoebe Bridgers album for that.

The date was a few months after my breakup. He was, by any reasonable measure, a good person. He asked follow up questions, and remembered the name of my dog from something I’d mentioned twenty minutes earlier. At one point he made a genuinely funny joke. And still, I found myself thinking: his shirt is a little tight.

By the time I got home, I felt relieved. As though I had narrowly escaped something.

But escaped what, exactly?

I wasn’t protecting myself from anything. I was protecting the version of myself that still had a reason.

We cling to heartbreak long after it’s expired, not because we’re still devastated, but because the alternative is harder to explain. So we manufacture distance. We find, in every person who might matter, the precise detail that makes them not quite right. Too eager. Uses emojis. Probably owns flip-flops.

It may look like discernment. It’s mostly just fear with better posture.

Because heartbreak is legible, it earns sympathy. Your friends buy you drinks, strangers reassure you that you’ve never looked better, your horoscope tells you Saturn is to blame. Nobody has a word for what comes after, though. That long, undramatic stretch where you’re not wounded and not healed and not waiting, exactly. Just a person in a room.

Vulnerability doesn’t have an aesthetic. It’s messy, private, and often goes unrewarded. Nobody is buying you drinks for being vulnerable. It’s just you, alone, getting a text that reads: I’m just not in a place for anything serious right now. Or its equally devastating cousin: You’re not like other girls. There is a script for it: the screenshot, the group chat verdict, the collective agreement that he wasn’t worth it. It helps for approximately one hour.

As long as heartbreak is the story, you don’t have to risk anything new. You don’t have to sit with the quiet, plotless fact of your own life moving forward without any guarantee of where it’s going.

A few weeks after the restaurant, my friend texted me a LinkedIn profile. Senior something-or-other. Nice smile. Went to a good school, she added, as if this settled something.

I stared at it for a long time. Not because I was considering it, but because I recognized what she was doing. What we’re all doing, really. Trying to get each other back into the story as fast as possible. Back into something with a shape, a direction, a point.

But there’s something on the other side of all that, if you can stand to stay in it. Not wisdom, exactly. Not healing. Just the slow, uncomfortable discovery that you are a person who exists outside of what has happened to you, and that this is both less dramatic and more frightening than any heartbreak you’ve survived.

The voice in my head swings between the trivial, why hasn’t he texted me back, and the vaguely theological: do I need God (and, if so, which one). There is no hierarchy. Everything feels equally urgent.

For a while, I mistook this for an inability to tolerate uncertainty. I told myself I was bad at not knowing. After a few hours spent rephrasing the same question to ChatGPT, just to see if the answer would change, a different pattern emerged.

I wasn’t avoiding uncertainty. I was outsourcing certainty.

Obsessing over AI interpretations and astrological readings gave me a false sense of productivity. It led me to a narrow, incense-heavy room, sitting across from a psychic beneath a buzzing neon We’re Open sign. As she assured me everything was “unfolding exactly as it should,” I nodded, relieved. An answer, even a vague one, felt better than none.

It was the comforting illusion of doing something to fix my unknowing: the belief that if I explained my confusion well enough, it would resolve itself out of courtesy. Rationalization as a remedy.

But each time I placed my phone down after a three-hour FaceTime, the realization was the same. Unpacking a situation again (and again) hadn’t brought clarity. It only made me more confused.

So why does it feel so good to spin in circles?

These tools work, but not in the way they are intended. They don’t provide answers or clarity; they provide relief.

There is a difference between reflection and deferral, and I had become fluent in the latter. I wasn’t looking for someone, or something, to tell me what to do. I was looking for someone else to hold the responsibility of not knowing. Or, at the very least, to offer a narrative that made the discomfort feel purposeful. Something (anything!) to suggest that uncertainty was temporary, and that a state of knowing was just around the corner.

As much as I wish this were a unique experience, I don’t think it is. There is something deeply seductive about narrative. Humans crave stories. Uncertainty has no plot, no arc, no guarantee of resolution. This is why it can feel so profoundly uncomfortable. And why narrative, any narrative, is soothing by comparison. Etsy witches and tarot cards offer narrative scaffolding: a way to believe that while life cannot be controlled, at least it can be interpreted. Even if that interpretation comes at the cost of reality.

At first, it didn’t seem like a problem. If a little reassurance took the edge off, what was the harm? But habits don’t announce themselves as destructive. They reveal their cost gradually, in small humiliations: repeating the same story with increasing urgency; waiting for reassurance before acting; realizing mid-conversation, as I watched the other person’s attention drift, how much effort I was putting into not letting something go.

As time passed, and the side effects of this habit began to register, the cost of externalizing intuition became harder to ignore. The longer I outsourced certainty, the quieter my own instincts became. The more answers I collected, the less capable I felt of choosing. Each time I looked outward, I was quietly teaching myself that I could not be trusted.

The questions still arrive at 2:00 AM. The difference now is that I don’t answer them right away. I let them repeat themselves. I let them stay unanswered.

Sitting with uncertainty hasn’t made me calmer or wiser, but it has made me slower. Slower to narrate, slower to outsource, slower to mistake relief for understanding.

A chance to notice the impulse to reach outward before acting on it. Sometimes I still reach. Sometimes I don’t. But the space itself feels like progress, even if nothing inside it resolves.

Not knowing, I’m beginning to realize, isn’t a failure of intuition. It’s the cost of keeping it intact.