Walking Naked Into an Unknown Future

Today I spent the day entirely alone. Completely, deliberately, wonderfully alone. And I loved it — perhaps more than I expected to. Perhaps more than is entirely comfortable to admit.

For the past two years I have written about loneliness more times than I can count — the particular ache of being far from home, of connections that form and dissolve, of a life lived at a beautiful distance from everything familiar. And yet recently something has begun to shift. The noise around the school has been growing, steadily and then suddenly, until it reached a pitch I could no longer absorb. And quietly, beneath that noise, a different kind of hunger has been growing to match it — a desire not just for quiet, but for true solitude. The real kind. The kind that asks something of you.

Yesterday I chose it. Simply and without ceremony, I chose it.

I rested. I walked. I took photographs of things that caught my eye without needing to explain why. I wrote, and thought, and let the hours move at their own pace without asking them to produce anything in particular. I gave myself the space to actually feel what is happening in my life — not to analyse it or resolve it, but to let it surface honestly and sit with what arrived.

And after hours of turning things over, something settled into clarity.

I need to be alone. Not for a day, not for a weekend — but for the next year. Truly alone. Not like a monk sealed in a cave, but present with myself in a way I have never quite managed while owing pieces of myself to other people, other dynamics, other stories that were never entirely mine. At peace with myself. Answerable, for once, to no one else.

I'm not sure I can fully explain why this feels necessary — only that it does, with a certainty that sits below thought, below reason, in the place where the things that are actually true tend to live. I have never done anything quite like this. There is something waiting on the other side of it that I cannot see from here, cannot name, cannot reach by any other means. It feels like walking naked into an unknown future. Exposed. Unprotected. Entirely, terrifyingly free.

This is not a decision made lightly. It has been arriving for a long time — gathering momentum in the background, growing quieter and more insistent in equal measure, until it reached the point where ignoring it was no longer an honest option.

I am excited. I am nervous. I am sad and happy and all the things that only arise together when something truly matters — when the cost is real, and the necessity is realer still. All of it at once, which is how I have come to recognise the things worth doing.

I tell people to be brave. I have said it more times than I can remember, to more people than I can count.

I think it is time to take my own advice.

It is time to walk this life alone.