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May. 14th, 2014 10:21 amMeant to mention this in my post last night, but I was running on fumes at that point and forgot. But here it is: I am now living on my own.
My roommate, doing an internship to get licensed as a medical lab tech, is now in PEI, and will be there until December. Home for occasional visits on long weekends, when it's affordable (a round-trip bus ticket costs about $130), but other than that, I've got the apartment to myself.
This is the first time I've lived on my own. Ever. Sure, there's been the odd half-week when I've been on my own when my roommate goes away on holiday or something, but this is on a much bigger scale. For weeks, sometimes months at a time, it'll be just me and my cats.
It's odd. For the first week, I kept having mini panic attacks, wondering how I'd get through this situation, because it was new and now suddenly all responsibility for everything was on me, nobody for backup if things went weird, and I had to handle it because there was no other choice. And that scared me. I've never been that great in new and unfamiliar situations.
I'm adjusting. It's actually not as bad as I feared it would be. I do some of my best work when I'm alone, I find. I cook more, which means I have more chances to eat healthy food. I clean more when I'm alone, too. I hate doing chores with other people around, and always have, out of the fear and annoyance that whoever else is there wants me to do things in a different way because it's not how they do it, so I just save myself the grief and do it when they're gone. Now they're always gone. I'm living to nobody's schedule but my own, so if I'm having a night of insomnia and get up and wash some dishes, or watch a movie until I fall asleep, or just want to spend a whole day lying in bed reading, there's nobody to get in the way of those plans.
The freedom is, well, freeing.
It has its downsides. I do get lonely. We still talk over Skype, but it's only for maybe an hour after I'm done work and before I go to bed, and considering I work on phones all day and have never been a fan of phones to start with, it's a bit of a chore to do that, but I make the effort because it helps us both. I'm not the kind of person who has many friends, really, so I can't satisfy my slim social cravings by just spending time with someone else, because I don't have a "someone else" to spend time with. Coworkers, maybe, but their social time usually involves parties and drinking, which is very much not my scene, so that would be more awkward than enjoyable.
But any loneliness I do feel is tolerable, not crippling, and I think I'm handling it pretty well. And I'm enjoying a lot of the freedom of living to my own whims and my own schedule. Granted, it means I have no onus to not be lazy about some things, which is a detriment, but I'm thus far not any more lazy than I was before. I actually find myself doing more around the apartment because I can do it when I want to. Not having anyone else to consider means that if I want to watch a movie, I can; nobody else is using the TV, so I can watch it then, not put it off until later, not have it eat into the few times when our schedules wouldn't sync and I'd actually be alone while my roommate was in class, so I feel like I have more time and thus less pressure to do chores. Which means I do them more.
My mind works in odd ways.
I'm getting company this weekend, though, since it's a long weekend, and that'll be kind of nice since we haven't seen enough other in a little over a month now. We have plans to go out for supper, go for a walk on Sunday and get those new frozen green tea drinks that Tim Hortons has, and generally just hang out for a bit before we return to what it quickly becoming weirdly normal.
My roommate, doing an internship to get licensed as a medical lab tech, is now in PEI, and will be there until December. Home for occasional visits on long weekends, when it's affordable (a round-trip bus ticket costs about $130), but other than that, I've got the apartment to myself.
This is the first time I've lived on my own. Ever. Sure, there's been the odd half-week when I've been on my own when my roommate goes away on holiday or something, but this is on a much bigger scale. For weeks, sometimes months at a time, it'll be just me and my cats.
It's odd. For the first week, I kept having mini panic attacks, wondering how I'd get through this situation, because it was new and now suddenly all responsibility for everything was on me, nobody for backup if things went weird, and I had to handle it because there was no other choice. And that scared me. I've never been that great in new and unfamiliar situations.
I'm adjusting. It's actually not as bad as I feared it would be. I do some of my best work when I'm alone, I find. I cook more, which means I have more chances to eat healthy food. I clean more when I'm alone, too. I hate doing chores with other people around, and always have, out of the fear and annoyance that whoever else is there wants me to do things in a different way because it's not how they do it, so I just save myself the grief and do it when they're gone. Now they're always gone. I'm living to nobody's schedule but my own, so if I'm having a night of insomnia and get up and wash some dishes, or watch a movie until I fall asleep, or just want to spend a whole day lying in bed reading, there's nobody to get in the way of those plans.
The freedom is, well, freeing.
It has its downsides. I do get lonely. We still talk over Skype, but it's only for maybe an hour after I'm done work and before I go to bed, and considering I work on phones all day and have never been a fan of phones to start with, it's a bit of a chore to do that, but I make the effort because it helps us both. I'm not the kind of person who has many friends, really, so I can't satisfy my slim social cravings by just spending time with someone else, because I don't have a "someone else" to spend time with. Coworkers, maybe, but their social time usually involves parties and drinking, which is very much not my scene, so that would be more awkward than enjoyable.
But any loneliness I do feel is tolerable, not crippling, and I think I'm handling it pretty well. And I'm enjoying a lot of the freedom of living to my own whims and my own schedule. Granted, it means I have no onus to not be lazy about some things, which is a detriment, but I'm thus far not any more lazy than I was before. I actually find myself doing more around the apartment because I can do it when I want to. Not having anyone else to consider means that if I want to watch a movie, I can; nobody else is using the TV, so I can watch it then, not put it off until later, not have it eat into the few times when our schedules wouldn't sync and I'd actually be alone while my roommate was in class, so I feel like I have more time and thus less pressure to do chores. Which means I do them more.
My mind works in odd ways.
I'm getting company this weekend, though, since it's a long weekend, and that'll be kind of nice since we haven't seen enough other in a little over a month now. We have plans to go out for supper, go for a walk on Sunday and get those new frozen green tea drinks that Tim Hortons has, and generally just hang out for a bit before we return to what it quickly becoming weirdly normal.