'EYOP'-maxxing or 'enjoying your own presence' is something I've always been attuned to but this year it is something I am finding more time for. As someone who loves spending alone-time, I truly appreciate being present without the influence of others. While I've been preoccupied with writing here and there towards my research book/memoir, I've also been reflecting on the meaning of deep time and its place in my own life.
There's a piece of ochre from Blombos Cave dating to about 75,000 years old- with crosshatch markings carved into its face. Someone sat there - alone, presumably in the dark and made a mark that meant something beyond the mark itself. Not for an audience or for anyone who'd come later and call it the birth of symbolic thought. They just needed to make it. That's the whole story. A person, alone, deciding they existed enough to leave a trace. I think about this a lot when I sit in a coffee shop with no one to perform for or go out for a movie when there's no one to narrate the moment to in real time. There's a particular kind of presence that only shows up when you stop needing a witness and when the only person checking if you're having a good time is the person having it.
I wrote, in an old essay, about drawing a diagram of myself: three names, three selves, all orbiting some governing Ithat can't fully account for any of them. I think that's still true. But what's changed is that I'm less interested in resolving the diagram and more interested in just sitting inside it. Taking the fractured self out for lunch. Letting her order what she wants and just trying to exist without absorbing the energy or stress of others.
The cave - in my writing is never just a literal place. It's a figure for interiority; the room inside you where identity gets made, unmade, remade, and exists away from the noise of who everyone else needs you to be. And maybe that's what a solo date actually is. Not romance, not even really for yourself in the self-care-Instagram-caption sense. Just going into the cave. Making the mark. Seeing if it still means something when no one's there to read it but you.
