Have you ever felt that lull at the end of a night when your socialising with your group comes to end with a sloped silence and someone breaks it by saying “…Well I’m gonna go to bed, I’m quite tired”, and you’re tired too, but your heart sinks anyway – you ignore your own needs because you’re so scared to be alone? This is me, everyday.

It took me a term and a half to realise that studying at Cambridge is an intensely solitary experience. The amount of solitude that is necessary in order to churn out that weekly essay is, I used to think, excessive – at times even crippling. There were moments when I felt like I was trapped within my room, like an only-child whose mum had left them at daycare.

Now I see my ‘me-time’ as paramount to my own self-sufficiency.

I used to rely on friends to go to talks, the UL and even coordinate times to eat dinner in hall in order to spare myself the thought of eating alone. I wasn’t just afraid of being seen alone, but being it too. If friends weren’t up for seeing Aubrey De Grey talk about living forever then that was it: no more Aubrey. I was missing out because I was afraid, and I no longer wanted to be.

About a fortnight ago, my friend said perhaps one of the cleverest things I’ve heard to date. She said, “Why is everyone so hell-bent on resisting their own pain?”

So I stopped resisting. I tried eating, working, clubbing and attending events all on my own. If you’re like me, the thought of doing all of the above will scare you. You’ll ask yourself what people will think of a person that seemingly has no friends. Perhaps you’ll feel pity. Or perhaps you’ll realise that those feelings of pity are a manifestation of your own insecurity to spend some time with yourself, and see if you’re an alright person to hang out with – to see if you’re any fun.

I went against the former for once and here’s how my week turned out: I started out little, avoiding the library. I realise now that this is an institution built to allow us to socialise without really socialising. To feel the comfort of people around you and work at the same time. But once I stopped thinking of my room as a prison that perpetuated a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), and more as my little private space with good natural light and silence, it got incrementally better. I enjoyed the silence for once. I now think of my room as a magic but dull-looking place that suspends time the minute you walk in to it. My room, my delusions, my rules

Next came the hard stuff: eating alone. I think society really sucks for reinforcing the idea that you must be sad if you eat alone. It makes people feel like they have an obligation to feel pathetic even if they just want to eat a jacket potato in the dining hall, in turn giving them this useless anxiety that they can’t shake off like a bad itch. That being said, nobody really seemed to care about my jacket potato or me. The relief that comes with realising that it’s not all about you is indescribable.

And the last feat of my rigorous anthropological research: going out alone. At the start of the week I was dreading this, but towards the end I could feel the faint glimmer of excitement upon me.

I won’t lie. I was anxious. Surely people would notice I wasn’t with anyone and therefore would deduce that I was a friendless, boring sod. I went anyway. I was there for the music. Perhaps I’d bump in to people and they’d let me latch on to them in order to preserve my dignity. Perhaps people would think me cool for being “brave” and aloof and self-sufficient. In the end, all these considerations racing around my mind at hyper-speed proved too much and I got marvelously drunk. The music was wonderful as expected. I did inevitably bump in to a few people who consistently asked me “Who are you here with?”, to which my spineless reply was “Long story”, and continued dancing with a grin on my face, floating through the crowd of partygoers.

For most of the night I found myself warmly lost in the music as I intended, and at other times scanning the room for people I knew. And then came a realisation: “Of course you’re looking for people, you are a social animal – it’s okay to be a little needy, you can hang out with yourself too, you did your bit, you’re happy.”

In some sense, trying to sustain a forced sense of isolation perhaps only made me realise how co-dependent I really am. Yet on the other hand I’d rather think of it as an experience that allowed me to accept my own vulnerability as an integral part of my independence. Being alone doesn’t mean you’re lonely. And not resisting it, in fact, made me happier. Even if just temporarily.