I’ve spent a grand total of two months of my life living by myself. Not just having a place to myself while someone else was away or until they moved in, but having possession of a place, from the front door through the kitchen and living area and bedroom, entirely on my own. Those two months were enlightening.
I learned that if I didn’t clean, no one else was going to, either. (Often true with roommates too, often, but somehow starkly true when you’re alone.)
I learned that if I didn’t figure out how to turn on the oven, I just wouldn’t have cooked food. (It required lighting a flame through a hole on the bottom of the stove, inside the door, which was good practice for relighting the three pilot lights that constantly went out on the 1954 Kenmore stove we lived with years later).
If I didn’t clean the dishes, sweep, vacuum, scrub the toilet—my place would be a mess.
And if I didn’t catch the cockroach in the bedroom, or the one behind the toilet, or the one under the sink, I’d have cockroach parties all over my place. No one else would know or care.
Most of all, I learned that taking good care of myself—and this I see anew each time I go to sleep early enough, each time I make sure to end the day in an organized, clean-enough home, each time I make a plan and then follow it—is a lot like being taken care of. It feels like being less alone. It feels safe, comforting. Like you’re okay, or at least like you can be. Like someone cares.
Because someone does.
This Glass Has Water 