“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.”

—Alice Koller

as requested, rebloggable: "What is another word for alone?"

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Check out how depressing these thesaurus.com entries for solitary are! This is why I don’t use thesauruses, especially when I do Otherwordly things. I refuse to believe that the only words for solitary are negative. I don’t believe that someone who likes their space sometimes should be called “friendless”, “desolate”, “distant”, “misanthropic”, “unapproachable”, “forsaken”. Those are terrible. Try these.

Solivagant means wandering alone; I’ve always wanted to post it but it has the same distinct suffix as something I already have up wait a second, it’s right here! Waldeinsamkeit is the feeling of being alone in the woods—something I could probably use today. Sturmfrei or stormfree is being alone, with the freedom do what you want.

If you wanted to get metaphorical, you could say you were an inselberg—an isolated mountain. And if you wanted to work baked goods in there somewhere, you could use eremite (closely related, of course, to ‘hermit’) which means someone who lives a solitary life and also, apparently, a “spiced cookie made with molasses, raisins, and nuts”.

If anyone ever asks why I do this, this is what I’ll tell them—because the universe and the people in it are a lot bigger than any one language can wrap its words around.

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape.”

—

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

—Deepak Chopra
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