About The Project
“Being Alone is the Absolute Worst Thing” documents a time in my life that one may refer to as my “origin story.” In my senior year of high school, I was fairly content with my life, but I had no clue about what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, and who I wanted to be. I spent my time with my friends and dancing ballet, unsure of my future but still trying to plan out where I was heading. Then, as we all know, the coronavirus caused normal life as we knew it to shut down, and my high school experience was suddenly over. While I was lucky enough to have spent meaningful time with my family at home, I quickly became accustomed to living in quarantine, with my only face-to-face contact coming from my immediate family and a small circle of people that were kept at a safe distance. As my life went on like this for months due to the pandemic, I had not even begun to think about how I was supposed to be moving away from home and starting college in the fall. And so when that time came for me to leave home, I was not only unprepared to leave my family behind, but utterly terrified of social interaction and unaccustomed to making new friends. Once I started the school year, I spent every second of the day alone. I drove myself crazy over my grades, responsibilities, and most of all, my seclusion from the outside world. This led my first semester of college to be very difficult, and marked by intense feelings of loneliness. My mental health was at an all time low, and I became completely lost in who I was and what my purpose in this world would be.
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Several months into this period of solitude, the freshmen were forced to leave our dorms and go home. So, in accordance with the rules in place, I moved back home with my parents, and then continued to live my life free from social interaction and new experiences. At that point, I knew that if I did not at least try to do something about the way that I felt that it would never stop. So, in my second semester of freshman year, I decided that I needed to find ways to improve my happiness and get better. I made my first step of this process joining a sorority. While this experience was nerve-wracking and intense, being able to go through it remotely at home helped me ease into it and work on becoming social again after so much time spent alone. This was also the kickstarter for my path of self discovery as I wanted to join a group of people that would inspire me to grow and learn about myself. Along with this, I began writing for a magazine at school, which provided me with the chance to work on my writing skills — which was one of the things that I have always known was a part of me — and interact with other students at Michigan. Slowly but surely, I was making the steps to combat my loneliness.
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While doing specific things, like joining clubs, helped me put myself out there, I also felt it important to dig deeper and understand where my sadness and anxieties came from in these darker points in my life, and more importantly, find a way to manage them if I ever felt like this again. This is where much of the self discovery came in — starting with changing my lonely time by myself into quality time by myself. Instead of scrolling through TikTok or comparing myself to others' Instagram posts, I journaled, listened to music, and went on walks. It was through this that I realized how my previous alone time was more in an effort to shut myself off and even tune myself out, whereas now, I got to understand my thoughts and my feelings and figure out what things actually made me feel good about myself. Instead of the temporary bursts of contentment that came from social media, I started looking for the things that provided me with real, sustained happiness.
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I could now see what sort of things gave me a sense of purpose, or, more accurately, what made me get out of bed in the morning. I found that I love listening to jazz music, I enjoy reading narrative fiction, and I love making mood boards. I also like to drink coffee, sit outside, and breathe fresh air in the morning. I love spending time with the people that I love, including getting to talk on the phone with my friends from far away, and even including my dogs. I most of all found that I really love connecting with people, which is something that I think was always in the back of my mind, but I had never uncovered until I gave myself the chance to. And with that, I also learned to enjoy my me-time, which is something that I can’t get enough of at the moment!
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And all of that brings me to now, and to the creation of this zine. My original subject matter for this project was a personal narrative that I had written about this experience for a student organization at Michigan. Sadly, this piece that included me sharing my anxieties and my path to self discovery, did not land me a spot in this club. After finding out that I had basically written about some of the hardest points of my life for nothing, I knew that I needed to find the perfect time and place for this story to be told, which happened to be once I started my writing minor. I knew that since I would be provided much creative control while also receiving generous feedback from my peers, I could breathe a new life into this story and give it what I had discovered that I needed: a chance to connect with the world.
