Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”
It still kind of kills me that I didn’t go. The Oh Hellos, one of my favorite bands in all the world, was playing the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids. But none of my friends could go. I agonized over it. Should I go by myself? I’d never been to the venue. Wouldn’t it be crowded? Wouldn’t it be weird? In the end, I didn’t go. The band had come to Grand Rapids on tour two years in a row. This wouldn’t be my only chance, I reasoned.
The Oh Hellos haven’t toured since.
When TopHouse announced a tour date in my city last summer, once again, none of my friends could go. I’d just returned from a trip. I was worn out and sunburned. Maybe I just shouldn’t go. But what if I never got the chance again?
There are two wolves inside me: Fear of Doing Things Alone (FODTA) and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
I don’t think I’m alone in this.
Part of this early adulthood state—“medium,” my friend Lillie calls it—is learning to do things alone or risk missing out.
I’ve learned a few things in my recent years of solo sojourning. (Bonus tip: Romanticize everything. It’s not a walk, it’s a sojourn. Live like you’re in a Ghibli montage.) So, here are my tips for doing things alone, and liking it.
Tip #1: No one is watching.
This one isn’t so much a tip as a truth my father told me as an anxious middle schooler stumbling over my tongue and changing body. On the way home from school, I would bemoan whatever I had worn or said that now seemed weird and stupid upon reflection.
“Don’t worry, honey,” my dad would say. “Everybody is so wrapped up in themselves, they aren’t paying any attention.”
What does this have to do with doing things alone?
When I had a side gig writing movie reviews (mostly of B-grade movies, franchises scraping the bottom of the barrel, and the occasional indie flick), I made a pest of myself begging my friends, acquaintances, roommates, and literally anyone to go and see movies with me.
Why did it seem so unbearable to watch a movie alone? Was it that I didn’t want to be “caught” alone?
I have a coworker who doesn’t eat alone in restaurants, but he eats at his desk every day. One kind of aloneness is public, the other private. (Yes, I see the irony.)
Maybe it’s some sort of pack or herd instinct that we haven’t evolved out of yet. Nature has taught us to pity the loner. What’s wrong with it?
Maybe my coworker and I worry that strangers will think we are pathetic for being alone, will think we have no friends.
That anxious voice that turns strangers into the worst version of Sherlock Holmes—deducing “loser” from a table for one—is wrong. My dad is right. Everyone is wrapped up in the dramas of their day, their grocery list, or the embarrassing goof they made at work. They are paying you absolutely no mind.
Unless you reach out.
Tip #2: Make friends of the moment.
I made myself leave my hotel room in Warsaw. The jetlag was poised to flatten me if I didn’t. (Bonus tip: Don’t nap when you first arrive in a foreign country.)
I arrived in Warsaw ahead of my coworkers, and I’d never traveled anywhere by myself. (Getting repeatedly left behind in museums by my classmates on a study abroad trip doesn’t count.) But I dragged myself to the Palace of Culture and Science, which has an observation deck. I reasoned that I could see the lay of the land at sunset.
Lots of other people had the same idea, because I found myself in a long, snaking line of tourists and camera tripods and struck up a conversation with the Colombian coffee wholesaler in line behind me. He delightedly recommended a coffee shop near my hotel.
To that tourist, I’m a stranger with whom he passed an hour. Our solo sojourns provide ample opportunities to make friends of the moment, to be someone’s story at dinner, or to provide an excellent coffee recommendation.
I made more friends of the moment when I mustered my courage and went to the TopHouse show last summer. Two girls behind me talked about working in marketing and wished me a safe walk back to my car. When the audience joined in singing a classic Irish folk tune, I heard their happy voices and felt warm all the way through. I was among friends.
Tip #3: Feed yourself (before the FOMO eats you).
When I went to Ethiopia the year after visiting Warsaw, I mapped out an intense sightseeing itinerary for my twelve-hour layover in London: Big Ben, Westminster, the National Gallery, and the British Museum.
London is miserable in August. Hot. Muggy. Crowded. The spring in my step had turned to a sweaty trudge by the time the British Museum closed. I’d been so anxious to see as much as possible that I hadn’t stopped to eat or drink. Not one scone or cup of tea.
And I learned a lesson: it’s very easy to let the pressure to “do it all” drain the fun out of anything. Drinking life to the lees can be dehydrating.
It took me too long, I think, to learn the obvious truth that things are missable. Even once-in-a-lifetime things.
That fear of missing out gets to you even when you are confident and content to do things alone. I constantly fight the urge to treat my life as a performance to perfect rather than, well, a life. Mine!
I have not failed at life if a stranger sees me buy a single movie ticket or if I miss a bucket list item for a cup of tea. My life is mine alone. And so is yours.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
