Forever Alone | Chapter 3: Exes & Existential Crisis (Part 1)
In which I get the puppy from hell, quit my job, lose friends, run out of money, get back together with an ex, and clearly succeed spectacularly at adulthood.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
The day after I broke up with Stephen I found myself at a weird, almost certainly haunted old hotel in DC with six middle-aged women, there to celebrate my mom’s birthday. The Mansion on O street is kitschy to say the least—it’s part rummage sale, part Alice in Wonderland. The whole building is actually a bunch of townhomes that were purchased together and fashioned into one large, winding labyrinth of themed rooms. There are secret passageways and rooms hidden behind mirrors, and stacks upon stacks of books and knickknacks. Almost everything in sight is for sale.
It’s a place you could easily see yourself disappearing; as if behind a secret curtain there’s a portal to another dimension. Maybe you step beyond the veil for a few minutes, only to walk back through to find a year has gone by in the real world. I wasn’t opposed to the idea.
I’d stolen away from my mom and her friends for a few minutes—down the hall, through the secret door behind a mirror, around a corner, and into the jungle-themed room—to call Kristen, who I’d enlisted in the role any best friend knows well: Breakup buddy. The person you reach out to when you’re sad, lonely, and feeling sorely tempted to call your ex-boyfriend, which your logical self knows is a terrible idea, but your emotional self doesn’t. It’s like having a stoic bouncer who keeps you out of whatever shady building you find yourself wanting to venture into; an immovable object of empathy who is immune to whining, cajoling, and bribing.
You’d think initiating a breakup would make it easier. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes getting broken up with allows you to be righteously angry; justified in your victimhood. How dare they. They’ll never find someone like me.
Being the instigator leaves a lot of room for doubt. I can’t be angry, because I did this to myself. And if I did it, maybe I should undo it?
I was sitting in a chair pulled up to the window, feet propped on the sill. It was cool and rainy, which is very abnormal for August in DC, but a hurricane was blowing through town. Being secluded in a weird old mansion, staring out at a gusty, sodden day, is incredibly melodramatic, which feels tonally appropriate when you’re a 23-year-old going through her second serious breakup.
I didn’t need to worry that Kristen wouldn’t answer. She had her phone on her at all times, prepared for an emotional spiral at any hour. She picked up and I wasted no time in asking, “Did I do the right thing?”
She heard my doubt but didn’t indulge it. “Yes.”
“How do you know?” I replied anxiously, needy for reassurance.
“Because you were feeling doubtful for a long time.” She’s patient and calm on any normal day, but it was ratcheted up a notch for the occasion. “You almost did this multiple times before you finally went through with it.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t know why I did it,” I huffed. “I just knew it felt wrong. And how do I trust that what I did was right if I can’t even give you a reason?”
She was used to me trying to lawyer my way around an argument. “I think you do have reasons. Legit reasons. You just don’t think they’re good enough.”
That was unnervingly true. I thought about how uncomfortable our relationship had gotten—like I felt itchy in my own skin; like I was forcing myself to sit still, when all I wanted was to get up and run. I thought about the little things that irked me—the way he styled his hair, the idiosyncrasies of his speech, the mildew that grew in the shower he never fully cleaned. The thought of getting engaged or married, or even moving in together, was panic-inducing. But should it have been? Wouldn’t a better, more accepting person have overlooked the little things?
I responded slowly, as if countering my own internal monologue instead of Kristen. “No. No, I think … I think I’ve always been a very driven, passionate person. I have something that motivates me. A goal I want to reach in life. I think that for him, the thing that drove him and that inspired passion in him was … me.”
We sat in silence for a few beats until Kristen said, “I think you figured out the real reason your relationship ended.”
I’d wanted Stephen to discover his goals and passions for as long as I’d known him. He wanted that, too, but he was lost and not particularly interested in finding his way. He once told me that he might have liked a career abroad, but that he wouldn’t do it because it would be too hard on our relationship, so he never bothered exploring the option further.
But I didn’t want him to sacrifice his personal or professional development for me. It felt slightly suffocating; like I was responsible for both my direction and his. Our early twenties were meant to be the time when we figured out what to do with our lives without anything tying us down. And the truth was, if the roles were reversed I wouldn’t have hesitated to prioritize my goals over my relationship with him.
Was that normal, though? Did that make me selfish, or just an average recent college grad trying to figure out what to do with her life?
I didn’t know the answer, but my mind craved a concrete reason I could point to that explained why I’d broken up with Stephen, and “He didn’t have enough ambition or direction for me” was good enough at the time.
It would take many years before I realized that wasn’t the whole story. Yes, I wanted someone whose ambition was a better match to mine. But the truth is, even if he had been super passionate and clear about his life trajectory, it wouldn’t have changed anything. I just didn’t feel strongly enough to make him a pillar I built my life around. What I couldn’t have articulated at the time was that, even though I highly doubted that it was possible, I wanted the option of loving someone deeply enough that they could at least tie for first on my list.
But I didn’t know that at 23. So, I told myself I’d broken up with Stephen because he wasn’t ambitious enough, and that choice cemented how I saw myself for a long time: Unlike him, I was someone passionate. Someone with big dreams. Someone who wasn’t going to accept the status quo. My identity now relied on becoming, much like in Regency times, an accomplished young woman.
I threw myself into the task with truly reckless abandon.
It helped that I positively hated my job and was desperate to do anything else. The fall after I graduated college I started my first real job as an events and promotions coordinator for an investment firm, which was as dull and pointless as you might imagine. I basically planned retirement seminars for older people and ordered custom pens for the office.
I also had a boss who enraged me day in, and day out. She was one of those women who’d got her start in the 80s, when being a woman at work meant you had to be a man—she was incredibly up tight and passive aggressive, and didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body.
Between her and the mindlessness of the job, I spent most of my time shut in my little office, scrolling through Facebook and reading online articles about how to find your passion.
My saving grace was Kristen. Like me, she’d moved back in with her parents after graduation and started a big-girl job. And like me, she was looking around at everyone she worked with, wondering why she was the only one who seemed to be questioning the point of it all.
Weeks into our new jobs, after commiserating back and forth over Google Chat, we decided to start seriously writing the book we’d begun outlining the year before, but had fallen by the wayside after graduation.
Both of us had experience in toxic romantic relationships—me with Patrick, and her with a true-blue narcissist who I’ll call Mervin, because I’m sure it would annoy him—and it infuriated us to see other young women repeating the same patterns. We wanted to write a self-help book for college-aged girls that would build confidence and self-esteem, while helping them avoid the pitfalls we’d fallen into.
Even then, a solid ten years ago, before influencers became a thing, we were savvy enough to understand that we’d never get published without some kind of audience. So, in between emailing edits of our book to each other at work, and actually doing the jobs we were being paid to do, we started writing and pitching articles to online sites geared toward millennials.
Our plan was to start our own blog, drive people to it by getting published on bigger sites, and therefore build a following that would eventually be ravenous for our self-help book. By the way, once, before Stephen and I broke up, I shared this plan with Kyle, a friend of Stephen’s, who laughed in my face and said, “That’s never gonna work.” Well, what ultimately happened may have differed from the original plan, but given that we did eventually build a following and a business that supports us both full-time, I’m now entitled to say a firm, “Screw you, Kyle.”
Kristen and I were incredibly fired up about our vision. We saw ourselves as mega-bestselling authors, going on the Today Show to promote our book, getting to quit our miserable jobs and be free to do something that actually helped people.
Naturally, the next phase was that we both move out of our childhood homes and become roommates. We craved adult independence, and thought we’d make a lot more progress on our big dream if we were living together. Plus, who doesn’t want to beat back the loneliness and existential angst of being 23 by moving in with your best friend? So, Kristen quickly found a job in my neck of the woods, and two months after my breakup we moved into our first apartment.
This was Chapter 3: Part 1 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 3: Part 2!