When people hear I was an only child, they tend to have one question for me: “Weren’t you lonely?” It’s somewhat of a loaded query for a casual interaction, but I’ve learned to answer people with what I know they want to hear: “No, I loved it!” The truth, however, is more complicated. I did love soaking up all of my parents’ attention and never having to fight a sibling for the remote, but as a bookish kid perennially on the fringes of school’s social circles, I sometimes longed for company. It’s not that I had difficulty occupying myself (that’s what Lemony Snicket novels and Lizzie McGuire were for), but that I sensed, on some level, that it wasn’t entirely normal to spend as much time alone as I did.
I think about the difference between being lonely and being alone with some regularity now that I’m living solo after a big breakup with my live-in partner almost a year ago. I share my studio with a mean little Maltipoo named Frank about half the time, but when he’s with his dad, it’s just me and my books and my RHONY reruns and my collection of vintage martini glasses and my slow-burning incense sticks. I do like this life—when I’m soaking in a bubble bath with a glass of orange wine, I’d even venture to say I love it—but there are times when I’m less sure, when I wonder if I’m somehow failing, or in fact fulfilling my only-child prophecy by not sharing my home with a partner or roommates anymore. And those are the moments when I tend to go on TikTok and catch up with the coterie of “loneliness influencers” I follow—or, as I prefer to think of them, my LonelyGirls.
The first loneliness influencer I was ever introduced to (via my friend Sarah, another single little-white-dog mom who also lives alone) was Lana Isa, or @lanasololife. She describes herself as a “friendless girl” and frequently films herself doing ordinary things—making waffle fries for dinner, returning Amazon packages to the post office, journaling—made somewhat less ordinary by the pride she seems to take in her utter independence, and her comfort in the I-live-solo silence I’ve come to know all too well.
There’s something intriguing to me about the lack of pretense in Isa’s daily routine. I’ve always done my best to follow Nora Ephron’s example in an essay from I Feel Bad About My Neck, and make myself a proper meal for dinner, sauteeing and chopping and hosting myself like a guest even (or especially) when I’m eating alone. But are Isa’s oven-ready waffle fries—which feel spiritually akin to the “pathetic container of yogurt” Ephron decries—an even bolder way of being alone, in their rejection of the idea that you have to wine and dine yourself in order to be happy in your own company?
I’ve also come to wonder if there is something subtly radical about women—like Isa and like Devon and Paulina Cee—who craft their public personas around privacy. When I start to feel down on myself about my single, solo-living life, I think of how few women in my familial line ever really got the chance to experience life without a (male) partner. Sure, there are predictable Cathy-comic moments (usually at 11 p.m. on Sunday nights, for some reason) when I wonder if I’ll ever find someone I actually want to live with again. But there are just as many moments when I exult in my self-determined life.
