Why Does Choosing Myself Feel So Lonely?

A conversation about the lives we choose and the ones we quietly mourn.

There are nights when I close every tab on my laptop, switch off the lights, and let the silence sit beside me. It asks questions I spend the entire day avoiding. They never sound complicated. They arrive as whispers that somehow weigh more than every loud opinion I have ever heard. They ask me whether I am waiting for someone or whether I am waiting to become someone. Every time I try to answer, I end up staring at the ceiling, hoping the darkness will answer for me.

People make growing up sound like a straight road. You study. You work. You fall in love. You build a life. Somewhere along the way, everyone begins speaking about marriage as though it is the final chapter of every beautiful story. They talk about finding your person with so much certainty that you begin wondering whether there is something wrong with you for hesitating. You start feeling guilty for wanting a passport with fresh stamps more than wedding invitations. Guilty for wanting empty train stations, unfamiliar cities, books with folded corners, and afternoons where nobody expects anything from you.

I have spent years believing I was searching for love. Maybe I still am. I picture myself sharing coffee with someone who already knows how I take it. I picture laughing over stories that make no sense to anyone else. I picture reaching for another hand during difficult days and feeling the relief of discovering I do not have to carry everything alone anymore. There is a warmth inside those thoughts that feels impossible to ignore. I think every heart wants a place where it can finally stop explaining itself.

Then another picture appears.

It is me sitting alone in a café where nobody knows my name. I am writing in a notebook while conversations drift past in a language I cannot understand. My phone stays silent, and for once it does not feel abandoned. It feels peaceful. I spend hours walking streets without checking the time. I wander through museums without someone asking whether I am finished yet. I miss trains. I find hidden bookstores. I collect stories that belong only to me. There is no pressure to become the person someone else imagined. There is only the quiet work of meeting myself.

The strange part is that both dreams make me cry.

People think loneliness only belongs to those who are alone. I have met people surrounded by love who still looked lonely. I have met people travelling the world who carried loneliness in every photograph they posted. It follows us into crowded homes and empty hotel rooms alike. Maybe loneliness is not asking for another person. Maybe it is asking to feel understood, even by yourself.

I keep wondering whether I have confused being chosen with being complete. Those are two different things, yet they often arrive wearing the same face. I used to believe that if somebody loved me enough, all the missing pieces inside me would finally settle into place. Years passed before I realised another person cannot introduce me to someone I have spent my own life avoiding.

There is another truth I do not say often.

I am afraid that one day I will wake up and realise I built my entire life around keeping someone else comfortable. That I smiled when I wanted to speak. That I agreed when I wanted to wander somewhere else. That I folded parts of myself so many times they forgot how to stretch again. People rarely notice these things while they are happening. They only recognise them years later when they find old photographs and cannot remember what the person in them loved anymore.

A few weeks ago, one of my subscribers, Dua, sent me an essay for this co-author series. As I read her words, I realised we were standing before the same question while facing different directions. She wrote about the pull between love and discovering herself, about imagining two futures and wondering which one would ask for the greater sacrifice. Her words stayed with me long after I finished reading them.

Dua’s essay:

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I find myself torn between love and the possibility of finding myself, but sometimes I wonder if it’s even love at all. I sit with this thought more often than I’d like to admit, fighting quiet battles in my own mind. The yearning for love, for touch, for companionship slowly eats away at me, and yet every time I begin reaching for the things that make me feel alive, I somehow end up abandoning them along the way.

I wonder if this is simply what growing up as a woman feels like. Being told that love is the destination. That eventually you will find someone, settle down, become a wife, become a mother, and somehow that should be enough to fulfil every part of you. But what happens when there are still other parts of yourself calling out for more?

Sometimes I imagine two versions of my future sitting side by side.

In one life, I choose love. I build a home with someone. Maybe there are children running through the hallways and warm dinners waiting on the table. Maybe there is comfort in being loved deeply by another person. There is a softness to that life that I long for more than I can explain. The thought of being held, understood, and cared for feels almost painful in the way I want it.

But in the other life, I choose myself.

I imagine sipping tea alone in a quiet corner of Beijing while the city moves around me. I imagine getting lost in the markets of Istanbul, hearing languages I barely understand while carrying pieces of myself no one there knows. I imagine hiking through Nepal with nothing but a backpack and my thoughts. There is something beautiful about the freedom of being unknown. About existing without expectations. About having the space to become someone before giving yourself away to another person.

And maybe that is the part that scares me most.

I fear that choosing love may slowly ask me to shrink pieces of myself over time. I have already watched it happen in smaller ways, hobbies left unfinished, dreams quietly placed to the side, parts of me becoming less important while trying to make room for someone else.

But I also fear the loneliness that may come with choosing myself. The possibility that I could spend years chasing freedom only to realise I have no one waiting for me at the end of it. Neither path promises certainty. Maybe love is not supposed to feel like losing yourself. Maybe freedom is not supposed to feel so lonely.

But right now, standing where I am, it feels as though I am being asked to choose between being loved and truly knowing myself.

And I still do not know which loss would hurt more.

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When I reached the final paragraph of Dua’s essay, I sat there for a long time without moving. What stayed with me was not the places she dreamed of visiting or the family she imagined building. It was the quiet fear underneath all of it. The fear that every choice asks us to leave another life behind. We rarely grieve the lives we never lived, even though they haunt us more than the mistakes we actually make.

I recognised myself inside her uncertainty. There have been days when I wanted someone to walk into my life and promise me I would never have to be alone again. There have also been days when the very same promise felt like a door closing behind me. I wanted company, yet I wanted distance. I wanted to be seen, yet I wanted enough space to keep becoming. Holding both desires at once can make you feel impossible to understand, even to yourself.

Maybe this is why growing older feels heavier than anyone admits. Every year asks us to choose. Every choice closes another door. We celebrate the path we take while quietly mourning the one we leave untouched. People clap for certainty, even though most of us are only pretending to know where we are going.

There are moments when I imagine meeting the person I might have become if I had chosen differently. Maybe they are living in another city. Maybe they found love at twenty-three. Maybe they never fell in love at all. Maybe they wake up every morning grateful for the decision I spend my nights questioning. I wonder whether they envy me the same way I envy them.

I wish someone had told me that choosing yourself does not always feel empowering. Sometimes it feels like sitting alone with your own company until it becomes familiar. Sometimes it feels like watching everyone move forward while you remain still, trying to hear your own voice beneath the noise of expectation. Sometimes it feels like carrying hope in one hand and grief in the other, unable to put either of them down.

Perhaps there is no perfect answer waiting for us. Perhaps love should arrive as something that expands our lives instead of replacing them. Perhaps finding ourselves should leave enough room for another heart to enter when the time is right. I hold onto that thought more than I hold onto certainty. It reminds me that this does not have to be a battle where one dream survives and the other disappears.

Until that day comes, I will keep choosing honesty over pretending I have everything figured out. I will admit that I want someone to hold my hand while also wanting to know who I become when I walk alone. I will keep believing there is a way to love without disappearing, even if I have not found it yet. If you have ever stood between these two futures, wondering which one asks for less of your heart, then maybe neither of us has been walking through this alone after all.

Co-Author Substack ID: Dua