So I went hiking by myself for 3 days and loved every minute of it. But I didn't go to "discover myself" or be alone with my thoughts; I'm already pretty sure of my identity and comfortable being on my own. But I did develop some thoughts and here they are:

Hiking provides a great backdrop to mull over a lot of internal dialogue, and I occasionally looked around for others to share a joke or observation with. Being left w/o that option, the second reaction was "I should tweet that". This made me think about an article I read.

It discusses the importance of 'bids for connection' in relationships, sharing things that are valuable to us as individuals and having them validated by those we care about is an important part of being human. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/

And I was just thinking about the social narrative of individualism, being your own person and not needing anyone, and also the weird shame we feel for using twitter or social media to share about our lives.

I got to the top of Kings Peak and literally thought, "now what?" There was no one with me to celebrate with, and no one at home to regale with tales of the journey.

And I think that's what a lot of us are going for with social media. We want to share our lives, we want to have others recognize our efforts as worthwhile.

And it's great that twitter facilitates that for me, esp when conversations in real life are too loud and fast, and require being in person.

Anyway, individualism is dumb. People are not people without other people. We can't be deeply human in a vacuum. Thanks for hanging out with me here.

Part 2 of the things I thought when I was alone in the woods: principles applied more personally.

Common responses to a person's singleness include admonition to be a strong individual, and reminders that one doesn't *need* another person to be valid. These are truisms, to be sure, but are also a Ying that should be balanced with a Yang.

We've previously established that people are social, and learn and grow by interaction and support within a group. Different people allow us to display/explore different aspects of our personalities.

One of the most helpful things I've learned is that in a relationship there are 3 entities: you, the other person, and the relationship. Using this concept helps me to not vilify the other person when the relationship isn't one that meets needs. It just means the dynamic is off.

Anyway, we all know that we are different versions of ourselves with different groups of friends/family or between work/school, etc. This is where a lot of the meaning of life is developed, sampling the varieties of being we can be and dimensions of relationships and connections

we can have. However,,, at least for me, it adds a lot of fragmentation to my life as well.
I feel comfortable with various friend groups, but could never host a party bc those groups are far too disparate to coexist comfortably. Likewise, I never feel completely comfortable

and understood in any one group because only certain aspects of my personality are awakened there. This is what I was thinking about, gently swinging in a hammock with a slight drizzle against my rain tarp in the Uintah mountains.

It was spectacular to be there. But there are limits to the comfort you can achieve while camping. Similarly, each foray into a new social interaction is like camping, leaving your home and bringing a little burden with you and experiencing a new place and perspective.

But you can't stay there comfortably. Not when you bed and your books and fresh clothes are at home. Where all of your little aspects are represented by your possessions and your decisions about time allocation and no one is here to fix you to a certain expected state, like an

atom dropping out of its quantum state by being observed.
Home, it's a feeling we all want, and it's not an isolated thing. People around us can help us in that feeling, by allowing us to be and explore more of ourselves. We aren't hanging out with with people who make us feel

alien, or worse, less than human.

So, we can't be deeply human without others, we also need those we are with the honor our humanity, to feel like a refuge. And I just... Have a hard time with that, with the fragmentation and being parts of myself with different people.

I've written elsewhere that I feel like an electron, comfortably bouncing between other atoms but not really attached to any one place. But what I crave more than anything is a home, a place to rest and be seen as all that I am. This I'm sure is a nearly universal feeling.

I guess this is where I get mopey about how I thought I'd found a person who was the most beautiful home I could have pictured. Like, if relationships were about shimming the spaces between a table with uneven legs and an uneven floor with love and kindness and mutual

understanding, a penny and a dime would have sufficed for the difference. And I wonder about the requisite feelings I have to enter into something like that again, how incredibly demanding it is to expect that at the outset of every potential encounter, but it just doesn't make

sense to settle into something where you are a fragmented person, only existing in 3/4 of your dimensions and using world encyclopedias to shim the table legs.

Idk what my point is now but if you've found a home I hope you cherish it and if you haven't I hope your camping is safe and fun and if you wanna come camping with me that's cool too.