Being alone is the best.

Stay with me on this.

Sure, it would be a bummer if, say, you were an astronaut and your ship exploded, leaving you floating off to a swift and painful death in the void. Or if you were a sailor who survived a shipwreck by clutching to a single piece of debris in the vast, empty ocean. But for a while—before the dehydration and starvation kicked in, before your lungs ruptured in the vacuum of space—it’d be some quality solitude.

Solitude like a single-occupancy fallout shelter.

Solitude like working overtime after everyone else has left the office.

Solitude like driving so far into the desert that the only sound is a centuries-old tortoise creeping across the sand.

Solitude like waking up in your own grave and deciding, “Meh, I’m already here.”

It’s not that I don’t like people. I love people. Just that when my energy reserves are depleted from spending time with them, I wish I could pull a lever that would deposit me directly into the molten core of the earth where I could sit and recover by eating butterscotch pudding straight from the pot and looking up whether “lighthouse keeper” is still a viable career choice.

(It is not.)

Of course, it can be dangerous to give in to solitude too much. To be utterly alone feels almost too indulgent, like when you were a kid and everyone else was out of the house, so you’d tiptoe into your mom’s closet and pull the hanging clothes around you so that everything was dark and muffled and soft, and you’d sit there quietly until you got hungry and realized you hadn’t thought to bring snacks. The challenge for us introverts is to see that there is value in engaging with the world as it is, even with all its noise and confusion and hard edges, its ceaseless demands and intrusions. It’s worthwhile to join in and become a tangible part of that infernal ruckus. Even if we must politely order our loved ones to leave us alone for several days afterward.

I often wish I weren’t this way. It would make life on a planet with seven billion people much easier if being around other humans left all of us energized and refreshed. However, until I find myself in a post-apocalyptic library like that one Twilight Zone episode…

Bill is out of town. An Affair to Remember is on. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr are about to get off the boat at Villefranche. I have a pot of butterscotch pudding and a fresh notebook. Spiral bound. College rule. You know. The good stuff.

It’s hermit time.