Why I Regularly Seek Solitude by Vendela Lilliestråle
Picture from Åreskutan during a hike last year - one of my favorite solo activities. That time though I was even luckier to be accompanied by Camilla Lundin
During the last Christmas break I decided to do something I had always wanted to do - hide from humanity.
Don’t we all have that urge from time to time, to just isolate ourselves, be alone with our thoughts and shun humanity? No? Ok maybe it’s just me and I won’t project anything onto you. But shortly, I decided to extend my last Christmas break for a total of six weeks alone in my family’s cottage in a small village in Norrland with exactly 70 other neighbors.
I was alone for the entire stay with the only exception for my brother visiting me two times to make sure I wasn’t approaching insanity. Spoiler alert: I definitely was. But in a good way. Ever since this experience, my urge to regularly spend an extended period of time alone has just increased. In today’s article I would like to share six insights I got from my transformative experience of solitude.
Reality is 100% subjective
Sometimes we believe we have to obtain certain stuff that is deemed desirable by society before being happy. If you just enjoy spending your days dressed up as Harry Potter, society maybe tells you to “get your shit together”. You need to fix stuff first, like starting to dress like a normal person, before being content and happy with your life. What I discovered might sound basic but being alone and having no one to really “judge” me in a traditional sense on a continuous basis, I started to realize that no one determines my happiness except me. Society might deem an evening walk as pleasant but mundane but I realized that I could reach a state of euphoria from simple acts like that.
2. All these mirrors
We barely have any mirrors in our cottage. I could therefore go a whole day without looking at myself. If I did find myself in a mirror, I could notice something fucked up with my face, like toothpaste all over my mouth, and I had no idea I had looked like that the whole day. But did it affect my happiness? No. It just affected the happiness of my 70 neighbors but that’s their business and up to them to traumatically journal about in their Online Magazine. I hadn’t realized before that point how surrounded most of us are by mirrors, selfie cameras etc. I came to think about that it may not be that natural and healthy to be that either. Animals and infants for example live in an absence of looking into mirrors and probably spend little time of their day thinking about how they look. Rather, they would if anything spend time thinking about how their body feels - are my legs tired from running, am I hungry etc. It’s a liberating and interesting thought to me how we would feel and behave in a society where we didn’t judge ourselves so often for something so inconsequential as our outer shell.
3. Our inner dialogue
Being alone, it became even more important to work on the ever so important relationship with myself. I’ve always been interested in that but now I had no choice but to get to know that freaky woman I was spending my days with. In my favorite book “The Untethered Soul”, the author Michael Singer talks about our inner roommate, i.e. the voice we constantly have in our head telling us stuff. It can be ordinary things like “Oh look, there’s a dog” but often times it is self-critical thoughts like “Why should I apply for that job? There are probably so many other good candidates out there”. Being by myself, I really had to make sure to raise my roommate. At times when it would say something negative, I became better at distancing myself from it and to just smile at my roommate and the narrative it tried to convince me of. What I’m trying to say is that this trip made me slightly crazy.
4. Awareness of the impact from the external world
Something that became very apparent to me was how much I am affected by other people. I have always been this way. I am sensitive to signals and if someone shows me the slightest signs that they don’t like me I will immediately back off. Tell me that you want to reschedule our coffee date from 2 pm to 2.05 pm and I will immediately do the job for you and unfriend us on Facebook, pack my bags and move to China so you don’t ever have to see me again. If someone is angry I tend to internalize that and feel their anger. I even adopt other people's way of viewing the world. If I spend time with a pessimistic person, I feel gloomy afterwards since I see the world through that person’s lenses. If I spend time with a person who loves life, I start to love life even more. The most apparent example was when I had a phone call with someone and I realized how much my mood could shift, yet nothing had changed in the “objective world”. My conclusion was that another person’s focus will easily become my focus. And what we focus on decides our mood. I therefore realized that I have to be conscious about where I receive my input. And since we cannot always control our input, it was just a great lesson for me to understand that I am highly affected by it.
I feel beyond blessed that my full-time focus is to spend time with my favorite women on this Earth - our members in Business & Dreams!
5. Getting to know 3-year old Vendela
Hello!
This was probably my greatest insight and the greatest gift of the trip. Being in nature I started to think about who this human named Vendela really is. Who would I be, if I hadn't been affected by society? I started to remember how I was when I was around 3 years old. I don’t have many memories but a confluence of my own few memories and other people's stories painted a picture of a really happy child with the biggest appetite for life. A true Yes Man in girl form. Then I tried to figure out when my light was dimmed and I realized that it happened when I was around 5-6 years old, which was the time when I started to view myself through the lenses of others. I was a bit chubby as a child and my thoughts and consequently emotions became occupied by how I could look better in other people’s eyes. I no longer felt worthy of all that happiness and didn’t feel entitled to all that space I had claimed before that. These realizations made me determined to go back to my 3-year old self and honor the amazing energy she had.
6. Dancing is the best
When I started to find my OG child energy, I gradually became so much happier. I started to laugh more and dancing just naturally became a large part of my days. I could sometimes dance for 1-2 hours straight during a day. I thought to myself “if one of my 70 neighbors would see this, they would definitely think I’m high”. And I realized that that will be my life goal - to feel like I'm high all the time and the only drug is my 3-year old year telling me that life is amazing.
Conclusion
Many of us spend our lives trying to find and create a home, a place where we feel the greatest sense of peace and happiness. Our own safe base camp to use the language of the hiking world of Norrland. This trip made me determined to create a home within myself where I am able to experience the emotions I wish and focus on all the abundance around me in any situation. I have to admit it’s not always easy. Coming back to Stockholm after six weeks alone proved itself to be a challenge as I am still a person highly influenced by my surroundings. But this solo trip was definitely a step in the right direction to create my own internal and highly subjective dream world.
I hope this article wasn’t too unserious and gave you some form of value, even if the value was “how not to write an article”. I would love to connect on LinkedIn or Instagram if you have similar experiences or insights! And on a very serious note: thank you so much for taking your precious time to read this article! It means a lot to me <3
