Newsletter 1 - Alone and Unashamed
Why this podcast and project exist.
Hello. Welcome to the HOW TO EAT ALONE PODCAST’S first ever newsletter, published, by chance, almost 3 years to the day of this project’s inception. I’d like to start by outlining why this podcast exists.
Sometime in March 2020, most of us were plunged into some kind of lonesomeness as the globe went into lockdown to stop the spread of Covid-19. When lockdown restrictions were announced in Portugal (where I was living at the time), the prospect of being completely by myself in my Lisbon apartment for an unspecified amount of time was immensely confronting. Though in the few years before the pandemic I had learned to love my independence and often referred to myself as a ‘professional single person’ (at 31, I had never really been in a long term relationship, had already lived alone for a few years, worked for myself and travelled solo several times), I was still someone who was always generally with people, doing stuff and being busy… weren’t we all? I knew that I quite liked being by myself, but had never had the opportunity to do much of it and, like many other people who found themselves in my predicament, was concerned about how I might cope once left to my own devices.
As the lockdown days rattled on and life as we knew it was swiftly dismantled, I found enormous comfort in my own company — my time was my own, I didn’t feel such pressure to conform and I stopped comparing myself to other people. But I felt guilty for feeling this way. How could I enjoy being alone at a time like this? Don’t get me wrong, sad things happened, most aspects of my life were either destroyed or put on hold etc, etc…. But as someone who has never been given permission to enjoy her own company, (because a woman on her own is not an acceptable thing) it was liberating in many ways.
One thing that I did struggle with, however, was how to eat alone properly. It had never been something that I’d managed to master. I either made too much and had to eat the same things for days, or I ate at funny times and so skipped meals or didn’t eat enough. I would order too many takeaways, eat too fast, eat sitting on the floor, I stopped doing the washing up so plates piled up high in my kitchen. There was one day when I just ate cucumbers. All day. Of the myriad of ways to eat badly, I tried them all. As an antidote to this, I threw myself into my recipe books for culinary inspiration only to find that, infuriatingly, most recipes are typically written for two or more people (*shakes small, lonely fist*). I found this frustrating. As a species we have thousands of different eating rituals, and yet none of these rituals celebrate or even acknowledge eating alone. So I took to social media and began writing and posting my own recipes which served JUST. ONE. PERSON. My goodness, did those posts hit a nerve! Many people got in touch to suggest what I should eat next or to pass on their own favourite solo meal. All of a sudden, I was trying out recipes passed on to me by people who were also cooking for themselves, who were also alone. Those recipes reconnected me to the outside world and made me feel less ashamed about being alone and less guilty in admitting that I was happy that way.
Ironically, though we live in a world dominated by the culture of The Self, being alone is a taboo. But for a few months, those who were by themselves for whatever reasons were VISIBLE and we began to have the conversations about loneliness and aloneness (which are not the same thing) that we so desperately needed to have. Fast forward another year; vaccines were issued, the virus had lost some of its clout, lockdowns were coming to an end. I started my podcast, recording people’s experiences of being by themselves, inspired by those solo lockdown recipes and a newfound braveness of speaking up about being alone. However, since the pandemic has ended, though many of us are still eating alone (myself included) the topic of loneliness has, once again, been brushed under the carpet and shrouded in shame, despite the fact that more of us live alone now than ever before and that, even before the pandemic, we were facing an epidemic of loneliness.
Today, when asked what I am working on and I explain this project and podcast, there is often an hard-to-hide reaction of worry and awkwardness… I liken it to the telling of a death in the family — many people often don’t know how to respond to my work, there is fear around this subject, still. I’m not surprised, despite almost three years of exploring this subject, I am still sometimes afraid of loneliness too. I even thought about bringing ‘How to eat alone’ to a close because I genuinely believed that associating myself with the topic would summon a life of friendless spinsterhood. It hasn’t. Arguably, I’d say that talking about being lonely has made me feel less so. Since this project began, I have been alone in a multitude of different ways because there are a multitude of ways to be alone. What I have referred to so far is the happy, expansive, freeing solitude that I found during the first couple of lockdowns. But, on the other end of the spectrum is a gnawing, clawing, oppressive loneliness that can feel inescapable. We have all felt both of these, plus everything in the middle. Aloneness sits on a broad spectrum and has many faces that pop up at the most unexpected of times — we can feel our most isolated surrounded by people, or our most supported by ourselves. I honestly can’t understand why we don’t talk about this subject more. It is not just important for our mental health, but loneliness and solitude are just so very interesting, so multifaceted.
So my aim for this podcast, newsletter and the content that surrounds it is very simple: WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT BEING ALONE. I want my subscribers to face aloneness, unashamed and unafraid and can tell you from my own personal experience that it helps immensely to look the thing you are the most scared of in the face and ask it what it is and why you might be afraid of it. When you sign up to this newsletter (it’s free!), you will receive these three things in your inbox, hopefully relatively often, perhaps even once a month:
A newsletter with a thought about loneliness – it might be a piece of writing, some art, a playlist, a recipe, an event, some things to do by yourself, some things I enjoyed doing by myself, etc…
A podcast episode.
A recipe for one.
And I hope that these three things and this project gives you some power to feel comfortable within yourself and, additionally, a bit of company should you feel you need it.
Thanks for reading!
Julia