Living Alone, On Purpose
Some mornings the quiet feels like a cathedral. The coffee drips, the light finds its way across the kitchen table, and I can hear the small creaks of this building settling into its bones. There’s no sound competing for my attention, no one’s mood to read or manage. Just stillness—and me inside it.
I live alone. Not by accident, not by loss, but by deliberate design. It took most of a lifetime to realize that solitude wasn’t something to fix. It was something to cultivate. I stopped apologizing for needing silence and started building a life that depends on it.
There are practical joys: I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, paint when the light is right. There’s no negotiation, no small talk, no background static. My energy is my own. I choose who enters my day and when. That kind of freedom is intoxicating once you’ve known what it’s like to constantly bend yourself around others.
But deliberate isolation has its shadow side. There are evenings when the silence feels like a weight instead of a gift. Times when I’d give anything to hear a second cup being poured or a voice calling from the other room. Moments when you realize that self-sufficiency can become a shield as much as a sanctuary. You look around and wonder if you’ve built safety or distance—or both.
Still, the trade is one I accept with open eyes. Solitude is the price of sovereignty. It’s also the condition that makes creativity possible for me. The stillness teaches me to listen—not to chatter, but to my own interior world, to the slow rhythms of intuition, to what the soul says when it’s no longer competing with noise.
Isolation doesn’t have to mean loneliness. It can be a laboratory for clarity, a greenhouse for joy, a home for the self that doesn’t need an audience. Some days the light feels sharp and beautiful inside this quiet. Some days it feels heavy. But either way, it’s mine.
Living this way is an act of authorship. I’ve written myself into this chapter—a seventy-year-old woman who wakes up each day in deliberate isolation, still curious, still creating, still learning the shape of her own company. And if there’s a kind of holiness in that, it’s not the holiness of withdrawal. It’s the holiness of finally belonging to myself.
