Summer break, at least for me, is about half way over (if not a little more) at this point. With two months of no classes done and a little over a month and a half left, I have to think about the ways I've spent my summer.
Not going to lie, most of my summer has been pretty dull. I've spent most of my time alone in many regards and most of the social interaction I get is from going to coffee shops or work. A lot of this can be traced back to my anxieties, where I just feel more comfortable at home and the very few times I've reached out have been thwarted by work or other plans by the other person. That brief interaction of my initiation of plans being denied fuels the often wrong belief that I should just give up trying to ask people to hang out.
So I have stopped trying to reach out to people and interacting with the world. And the result is me spending a lot of time by myself, typically not leaving the house and if I do, it's to go to familiar places like coffee shops.
This isolation has been a good and bad thing for me. The negative side is that my anxieties are much louder in the few interactions I do have with the world (both in actual interactions and what I write on the internet).
For weeks, this isolation fueled my anxieties and I said some really awful things that came out wrong. This isn't meant to serve as an excuse but rather an explanation. I felt like I was falling through the cracks of my social web and lashed out at the world for letting me go.
But the good side, or at least what I keep telling myself, is that being alone also gives me some space and time to make sure that I am okay. I've definitely started to see the world a little differently as someone who is flying relatively solo.
My dad came to visit me last weekend to just hang out and that was a wonderful thing for me. We did a lot of things that was really great because the activities simply got me out of my routine and out of my house. At some point during the visit, my dad looked at me and said some thing along the lines of "I've done things alone before. There's nothing wrong with doing things alone."
And I guess that's what I have been struggling with for the past several months. I've felt a social expectation that going out into the world, I should have someone by my side. But now, I'm tired of spending all of my time isolated from the world, spending time after time alone in my house.
Anyway, basically I've come to the conclusion that being alone in the world isn't the death sentence I once thought it to be.
