Living Alone: What?

Want to hear something that becomes surprisingly frustrating? Two days into this week and I have barely spoken out loud for more than a few minutes. Now, living alone is something most people don’t think about, in fact, I am sure that there are people that wish they live alone.

But, as the days become weeks, the weeks become months, and now the months have become years, you get over it. To be honest, living alone becomes a frustration, a thing that bothers you on top of all the hundreds of other things that frustrate you in daily life.

Take for example simple household chores. I have tried having this conversation, with family and friends, and they never quite seem to understand. See, if I talk to a mom in a family they always go “Well yeah! I do all the dishes, wash the floors, make the food! No one ever thanks me for it!”

Ironically, if I talk to the dads, they start waxing poetic about their garden work, the house maintenance, and everything else. When I tell either of these groups “Yeah, but I do the other things as well!” they just shake their head and insist that they do more work around the house.

People, I want you to imagine all the work you do in your house, and outside the house for that matter, and double it. If you live with a partner, parents, roommates, or just friends, you are not doing everything. You unload some amount of work on the other people in the house.

Living alone means that you must do everything, I don’t mean everything in the garden or everything inside the house. No, I mean, every, single, thing.

If the kitchen is empty, I must know what to buy and where. If the roof starts leaking, I need to make a plan to fix that. Want to know what you are eating this evening? Well, guess who must start planning that almost first thing in the morning.

I get that if you are looking after a garden, as the MAN of the house, you are doing a lot of work. Or if you need to clean the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the TV room, and make sure everyone is fed, that is a lot of work.

But if you live alone, you do all of that, all the time, and the sheer amount of things you need to track becomes a legitimate problem. Now there is one advantage to living alone that I do have, my areas tend to stay cleaner for longer and I must make much less food.

This sounds fantastic on paper but also means that I can start tracking where I move through the house just by the worn-out trail in the carpet. No joke, I moved a piece of furniture the other day and the carpet was soft and plump, the way it probably was when brand new.

The things that are starting to get to me are increasingly becoming my everyday life. This morning I woke up and realized I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be doing for the day. Apart from the usual, studying AWS, trying to remember Azure things, and watching some YouTube. The grander plan for the day was entirely in my hands.

Something that I loved dearly about this past vacation was just that though. I woke up each morning and my family had already decided on what they would be doing for most of the day. All I had to do was make sure I was dressed and ready to go.  

That is a delight that I think so very few people know or realize they have. Waking up and hearing someone asking if they can go somewhere, or if you want to go to that place with them. I wake up in the morning and sometimes must convince myself to unlock the front door.

Like today, I swear this is true, I have not stepped outside. It’s cloudy and rainy and there is nothing I must go and do. If I was living with someone by now, they would probably have asked me to go out and buy cheese, or milk, or bread. All things that I don’t have any of in my fridge.

Because again, I don’t eat those regularly enough to motivate always having them. I’ve found myself the first week of our vacation almost locked in a state of shock. I woke up and before I could process the light outside the bedroom I was told where we would be going and what we would be doing.

It wasn’t until the second week of the vacation that I finally started being able to process everything. Capable of seeing what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to see. This means there was one day when I went exploring the places all on my own.

And then, naturally, I got sick on the last night we spent in Sedgefield, which meant for the next week we spent in Pretoria I was just a kind of blob. Going from place to place, trying my best to have some brainpower going. But still, I wasn’t alone and people and things were waking me up during the night.

Now, a full week back home and no longer sick to the point of not functioning I have found myself contemplating just how boring it can be when living alone. Yes, I can go fishing any time I want down by the dam, but I still do it alone. I must decide what to eat, on my own. What’s worse, I must motivate myself to vacuum the entire house.

That last one is something I really do need to do; I’ve not done it last week owing to the sickness. But now I find myself sneering at each little piece of dust I notice on the floor.

 

The Other Bits

Here is something else I just thought of, going to the doctor is easier when living with someone.

I can still remember when I was living with my parents, a doctor’s visit was someone taking me there, the doc checking on me, and then sending me home. This last doctor’s visit was a whole separate kind of boredom. Do you know what you do when you are an adult and must visit the doc on your own?

You go in, fill in some forms, the doc chastises you for being overweight, and then you go out back into your car to go get the medication. Man, last time I went with my dad to the doc he decided to buy some pancakes for use after we got the medicine at the pharmacy.

There are just so many little things that having a companion with you makes so much better. People like to wax poetic about it online, “This man lives alone in the woods!” but the reality is that those people make videos about it for companionship.

Most of the time they live with a loved one that just doesn’t want to be shown on the videos. Now, I also do kind of get that, if I had the choice, I would have a place to escape to too, but the reality is that I live permanently in a place that would be used as an escape.

Which means I now crave to be with someone. But at the same time, I have become picky, spoilt in a sense, by myself. Let us look at the food situation a bit more in-depth. Do you know how little I can eat sometimes? I am right now preparing my dinner and it will consist of potatoes, a piece of meat, and some veggies.

Few people I know would be happy with something so bland. And it is because it is normally accompanied by ten different things to eat. Or let us look at my bedroom.

I have been informed that it is extremely plain. Which is by design. Because as I have moved up in the world and become an adult, I can no longer stand the idea of having a computer, console, or TV in the same room where I sleep. I want it to be exactly as the name described. A bedroom.

Which for me has meant that it should contain a bed. And that is almost the only thing in there, everything else is in there because I don’t have space to put it somewhere else. Right now, it has a brown duvet set on it. The walls are brownish.

I have a brown bedroom.

It is plain, but for me alone, it serves the purpose of what it should do, I have nothing hanging on the walls or even anything interesting on the bedside tables. And that is probably how it will be in the next four houses I move into when I move out of this one.

The only thing that may ever change this is if I meet someone that shares the bedroom, and bed, with me. Even then, I have grown so nitpicky that the material of the duvet set is something that will affect whether or not I will accept it. Just having something pretty for the sake of being pretty is no longer acceptable.

It needs to look, but feel, nice all at the same time.

I say this, while I have three build-a-bear Pokémon plushies sitting on the cupboard next to me in the office space.

Anyway, that has been me talking about living alone and the things that I have thought about while living here. This year I plan on moving out, it has been one hell of an experience living here, but I am ready, and willing, to move away from here.

The goal is the United Kingdom before 2025!