One Year Of Solitude

A Reflection On My Past Year

It’s been about a year since I graduated from my undergraduate degree and returned home to live with my parents. It is a year which I will not remember fondly. I will remember it for the loneliness, the failures, the depression and the dread. But even though I would rather not have gone through what I did, I think it was also a year of tremendous growth. It was a year where, time and time again, I faced challenges and overcame them. And even though I never got exactly the triumph I wanted in the end, I feel very fortunate for the way things have turned out in the last couple of months. So I am trying to remember this time also as one of resilience, hope, and growth.

When I walked for graduation, I was already in a fairly dysfunctional state. I had been stretched thin by commitments to five classes and two clubs. Abysmal turnout and activity in the one I ran (animal advocacy) was greatly depressing to me. I felt like an imposter and a failure, and every outcome seemed to confirm that for me. My anger and depression spilled out in my interactions with friends, alienating them from me. In other words, I was in exactly the wrong mental space for graduation, though I didn’t know it.

After graduation, I almost immediately got a job offer. It was by chance, when I was picking my sister up from one of her friend’s houses. Her friend’s father and I were making small talk, and he said he had an Industrial Engineering job opening. I interviewed for the position and got the offer. It was a small medical device company incredibly close to home. After I got the offer, I had a week to ponder whether or not I would accept it.

I’ve thought about this decision many times, because in many ways I think it was like the decision to take the Red Pill or the Blue Pill. This job offered a decent starting salary, and the people were fairly nice, and it was right next to home. On paper, it was a great opportunity. But the job was not in my nature. I needed to be out there, in the world, doing what I loved with people I genuinely connected with. This job would have me stuck at home for potentially years, doing what I dreaded with people I felt no connection to. In the end, I said no to the offer.

During the summer, I began looking for jobs in earnest. I was new and naive when it came to job-seeking. For whatever reason, I felt that landing a job wouldn’t be that hard. Maybe after a few dozen applications over the course of a few months, I’d get someone who would want to hire me. But when application after application received an infuriatingly polite rejection or worse, an infuriatingly impolite ghosting, I began to fall into despair and desperation. I applied to more and more places with a wider and wider scope. I sent my application into the wind, hoping for a response. Too often, there was nothing.

Better and worse were those times where I got an interview. Because they were relatively rare, there was a lot of pressure to perform well. I once missed an interview and, when I found out, became inconsolably angry with myself. They ended up hiring someone else. The other times, I would interview, and it would seem to go alright, and then I would receive that polite rejection letter that made my heart drop into my stomach. It felt like there was something I wasn’t doing or something I wasn’t saying in the interview which was losing me these fleeting chances.

I did get close to getting a job offer once. It was a data management position at a highly effective animal advocacy organization, and I passed the application process, the initial interview, and a trial task, and was one of the final two candidates. After the final interview, I was nervous. It seemed like the perfect triumphant end to this tale of woe. Finally, after months of struggling, I would have figured it out. I would have a job, proving I could find one to my parents. I would be working at an effective animal advocacy organization, which would prove to others in the EA and animal advocacy communities as well as myself that I was worthy of praise. I would have the freedom to move away from home on my own terms. I was within touching distance of leaving this behind, or so I felt. Alas, I was not offered the job. And with that, I was back to square one.

There is something uniquely soul-crushing about the job search process. Something about that search bar above those little round-cornered boxes, each with a neat little title and an impossibly wide salary range and a preppy little description is just so Black Mirror coded. Feeling forced to go back there again and again and coming away with the same machinated response was absolutely awful. I still can’t look at Indeed without getting a horrible feeling of dread, like a heavy blanket draped over my shoulders. Over a hundred resumes sent and cover letters written, enough that I split my partial archive of them into 2 folders, and I know that I’ve done much less applying than some others. Dozens of interviews with polite, polished, glassy-eyed Human Resources, some of whom I never saw or heard from again. To me, the veneer of sickly sweet was more horrid than the bitter putrefaction it attempted to hide. At least if they were bluntly honest about how little they cared, I could feel like I could drop my end of the pretense, and thus be a little less guarded. But I cannot blame them, at least some of them, because they were just doing their jobs.

From September 2023 to April 2024, about 8 months, I was trapped at home without the promise of deliverance. My home is in a relatively far-out suburb of the Twin Cities, where one has to drive to get anywhere worth going. It’s a nice suburb, filled with code-abiding trees and neatly trimmed lawns. But, to me anyway, it’s a Ghost Town. It’s dead. People physically live there, but no one knows each other, or at least, our family doesn’t know any other families (except maybe for 1, though even that family and ours have drifted apart). What I see now but perhaps did not fully grasp at the time was that this was the first time in my life where I was really and truly cut off from the social fabric I had grown accustomed to. Before this, I’d had school and college. Even if I was something of a loner, those institutions kept me woven into the social fabric, giving me the space to form authentic connections and feel recognized as a person. But returning home ripped me away from that fabric, and I spent the better part of those 8 months torn away. This, perhaps more than anything, contributed to my misery.

I’ve read a little about the concept of alienation (not necessarily Marx’s alienation), and I think it makes some sense of what I was going through. To be alienated is to feel separated from something or someone one is naturally close with, so to feel alienated from one’s parents (as I often do) is to feel both that one naturally ought to be close with one’s parents and that one is (unnaturally) separated from them. During these 8 months, I felt a multitude of alienations. I felt alienated from my society, because I did not fully participate as a working member in some institution. I felt alienated from the job search process because I did not feel cared for by potential employers, and I did not care for many of those employers either. I felt alienated from my peers, as they had defined roles in society and were making progress while I did not have a role and was in limbo. I felt alienated from my parents, because try as they did, they couldn’t understand what I was going through. I felt alienated from my friends, because of the impossibility of bridging the physical distance between us. I felt alienated from myself, because I had a dream my life would be so different from this one that I was living. I felt alienated from my struggle, because I never felt that my situation was worthy of even being recognized as such. After all, I had everything I needed—food, water, shelter, air, medical care—so the struggle couldn’t be real.

If alienation and solitude had been all I had, I would not have survived those 8 months. But I was fortunate to have had those things which saved me. First and foremost were my closest friends, C, E, and Ir (you know who you are). C has a care and affection for me which exceeds all rationality, and I cannot thank her enough for those times where she invited me to stay with her. She’s always been excited to be with me, to the point where I feel guilty that I don’t have the same energy. The times with her and her social circle have been brief reprieves, like a cool wind upon my feverish brow. E has been through thick and thin with me, despite us only having about one semester where we were in-person together. Our connection is one of the few in my life which truly transcends distance. We have leaned on each other—perhaps too much, sometimes—but we have always been able to come back to one another. I am incredibly grateful and thankful that he has been my rock through all the things we’ve been through. Ir and I have been friends since middle school, and it was my loss that we did not reconnect sooner. We know each other well and share a deep mutual understanding, so her apartment became a sanctuary for me. She is a huge supporter of mine, and I am very thankful for and happy about the times we spent together. I’m also thankful for my other friends, particularly R and Is, for doing their best to keep in touch with me despite their very busy schedules and important lives. I am thankful for my sister, with whom I have a strong sibling bond and who is maybe the only other person who understands the sometimes maddening dynamics of our family. I am thankful for my therapist and DBT group, who have been crucial sources of unconditional encouragement, recognition, and positive regard. And I must thank my parents for supporting and caring about me the best way they knew how.

Thinking about all these people, there is one person I almost forgot to thank: me. I could not have gone on without the help of others, but their help would have been wasted if I had not wished to help myself. I wasn’t always there for myself, and it’s something I’m still working on. But I was there sometimes, and more as time went on. I sought out meaningful things to do, even creating this substack for myself. I reached out to those who could help me and who cared, even when I felt undeserving or guilty. And I think at some level I really did have love for myself, hope for a better future, and the belief that what was happening to me was not my fault. I felt I was putting forth an authentic effort to better my life, which was why it hurt when others either failed to validate that or outright invalidated that. And through all of this, I never gave up, even when I felt like I couldn’t keep going on. I was there, in some sense, in my own lowest moments, when I felt abandoned by the rest of the world.

I’ve not yet achieved the full triumph which I so desperately wanted, the one which would make my parents proud and would get tons of congrats on LinkedIn. Nevertheless, I did get an opportunity which has opened quite a few doors for me through my Master’s program, and I am very grateful for how things turned out. It’s almost like I took an unintentional gap year and got a final-year-and-a-half do-over. I’m hopeful for better things to come out of this.

I went into this year with some scars. I went into the year with incredibly, unrealistically high expectations for the life I would live and the impact I would have. Hand-in-hand with that was the bitter disappointment and exhaustion of my final semester. This year forced me to begin the healing process for those, however painful that was. I had to acknowledge the possibility of a mundane life, of the inundation of disappointing results. I had to acknowledge the lack of control or firm narrative for my life. I had to find worth in my life more detached from the worth that came from others, from acknowledgement, from power. I found that the moments which saved me were the moments which grounded me in ordinary humanity. Hanging out with a friend. Singing in the car. Painting. Games and media, in moderation. Spending time with my dog. The most fundamental source of my strength were these moments which improved the moment, and which together made my life worth living even by themselves. I went into this year living only for others and only for the positive impact I could create. I come out of it with a much greater appreciation for my personal life, separate from the professional persona I may cultivate.

But I come out of this year with new scars, too. I hesitate to call it trauma, because I don’t want to invalidate the experiences of greater traumas. But it is certainly something trauma-like, something which is at the edge of activation within me at all times. Thinking about this year and thinking about the uncertain future still makes me feel dreadful. Getting a secure job and career path still feels like climbing a mountain. And it’s hard for me to bear the thought of another year like the one that’s passed. In these ways, I still live in the past. I am still trying to move past the past, to remind myself that it is past, and that the future will be different, even if it’s not exactly how I desire or expect it to be. This year has, in many ways, further estranged me from my parents. I credit them for doing the best they could to support me, which is something not every child can count on from their parents. I rarely felt truly emotionally supported or trusted by my parents, though. It felt like they always doubted the paths I chose, that they had a lecture or criticism ready for many a circumstance. They never seemed proud of the efforts I made or the little successes I achieved. I didn’t ever really feel understood by them, and because of that, I felt disconnected from them. It felt like they saw those things which made me me—my authenticity, my activism, my insistence on meaningful work—as weaknesses which they would rather I not have had. Letting go of my dependence on their regard for me and finding other people who could give me the support they could not has been and continues to be something I work on. Intertwined with all of this is a newfound fear of being isolated and abandoned. In a sense, my society abandoned me when I graduated. Physically, if my parents hadn’t taken me in, I would’ve most likely been homeless. But just as critically, I was socially abandoned by larger society. I had few opportunities to form genuine connections with others. I felt like I was invisible to others everywhere I went. They saw me as just another passerby, interviewee, client, obligation, or professional connection. This was not the fault of these other people, but just the nature of my situation and of our society.

My experience tells me that we feel most fulfilled when we form connections with others through meaningful work which makes a progression. We want to do work that we see has real social value, which advances our own lives, and which is done with people we feel deep connection and respect toward. That is why I want to work, and I think that forms a big part of the intrinsic motivation for most people in most walks of life. But the opportunities for people to do meaningful work and form meaningful connections outside of the workplace feel relatively few. Even volunteering opportunities seem pretty difficult to get, and I feel fortunate to have gotten the opportunities that I did. And from what I hear, the situation in the corporate world may not be so much better. There might be some companies and organizations where work is still intertwined with meaning, connection, and progression, but I have heard too many stories of employees being treated more as resources than as humans, and I have seen too many job postings for seemingly pointless or boring jobs. I think the lack of meaningful work which connected me to others, more than anything else, created the nightmarish Limbo I found myself trapped in. I have little doubt that I am the only one who can relate.

I write this from home, being between semesters in my Master’s program. But while I am in the same physical space that I was almost a year ago, I am in a different figurative place. I have the knowledge that I will be returning to my campus in a few days, where I will be reunited with my friends. I have several projects which I can work on which I find highly meaningful. And I have a new me, one who has been tempered by the trials of the year. Though I still find myself trapped in the past from time to time, I am getting better and better at catching myself. What I went through is now in the past. The future will be different. And if the present is anything to go by, the future will be better, too.