My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Learned to Be Single Without Feeling Lonely
By Tessa, 35 — Washington, DC
Being single without feeling lonely is something nobody teaches you how to do. When my marriage ended six months ago, the loneliness didn’t come from missing him specifically — it came from the silence. The apartment was the same apartment, the kitchen was the same kitchen, but without another person’s noise filling the rooms, I could hear how hollow everything sounded. I would come home from the newsroom, drop my bag by the door, and just stand there. Listening to nothing.
I am a journalist. I interview strangers for a living, coax stories out of people who don’t want to talk, and somehow, in the last decade of my marriage, I had stopped asking myself a single honest question. How did I feel? What did I actually want on a Tuesday night? I had no idea. I had been performing partnership so thoroughly that I’d forgotten what my own preferences even were.
The Night I Realized I Was a Stranger to Myself
It was a Thursday in February, maybe three weeks after he moved out. I was sitting on the couch with leftover Thai food and a glass of wine that I didn’t really want but poured out of habit — because that’s what we used to do on Thursdays. And I thought: do I even like red wine? I genuinely didn’t know. I had been drinking whatever he opened for ten years.
That sounds small. It is small. But it cracked something open in me. I started a list on my phone, just for myself. Things I might like. Things I hadn’t tried. Things I used to do before I was someone’s wife. The list was embarrassingly short. Long baths. Reading before bed instead of watching whatever series we were halfway through. Sleeping in the center of the bed. Candles — the kind I used to buy in my twenties, the ones with the wooden wicks that crackle.
I went to the store the next day and bought four candles, a jar of fancy bath salts, and a novel I’d been meaning to read for two years. It cost maybe forty dollars. It felt like the most radical thing I’d done in a decade.
Learning to Enjoy Being Alone Again
The first few Friday nights were the hardest. Friday is a couples night — everyone knows that. My married friends were out at dinner. My single friends were on dates. And I was in my apartment with my candles and my novel and this enormous, aching quiet. I would catch myself reaching for my phone to text him something — not because I missed him, exactly, but because I missed the automation of having someone to narrate my life to.
So I started narrating it to myself instead. I know that sounds ridiculous. But I would run a bath and actually notice the temperature of the water. I would eat dinner and taste it. I would put on music — my music, not our music — and let it fill the apartment the way his noise used to. Slowly, the silence stopped sounding hollow and started sounding like space.
My therapist told me something I keep coming back to. She said loneliness isn’t the absence of other people. It’s the absence of yourself. When you’re disconnected from your own body, your own wants, your own rhythms — you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone. That’s what my marriage had been, near the end. Two people in the same room, both lonely.
I started paying attention to my body in ways I hadn’t in years. Not in a fitness way — in a sensory way. What textures did I like against my skin? What temperature did I want the shower? When I stretched in the morning, where did I hold tension? It was like learning a language I used to speak fluently but had forgotten.
What Self-Care Actually Looks Like After Divorce
I want to be honest about something. When people say “self-care” after a breakup, they usually mean face masks and brunch with girlfriends. And those things are fine. But the self-care that actually changed something for me was much quieter and much harder to talk about.
One night — maybe two months in — I was lying in the bath with the wooden-wick candles going and the novel balanced on the edge of the tub, and I just started crying. Not sad crying. More like thawing. Like something frozen inside me had finally gotten warm enough to move. I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had touched my own skin with any kind of tenderness. I moisturized my legs every day but it was mechanical, rushed, something to check off before putting on pants and going to work.
That night I didn’t rush. I stayed in the bath until the water went lukewarm. I dried off slowly. I put on lotion like I meant it. And then I got into the center of my bed — my bed, the whole thing — and I lay there in the quiet and I felt, for the first time in months, like I was actually inside my own life.
A friend had sent me a small wellness device a few weeks earlier, a HiMoment thing, with a note that said “for your solo era.” It had been sitting in my nightstand drawer, still in the box. That night I opened it. Not because I was desperate or because I had some grand plan for a sensual awakening. I opened it because I was finally curious about myself again. That felt like the bigger shift — the curiosity. The willingness to ask: what do I actually like?
It wasn’t cinematic. I’ll spare you the details. But afterward, lying in the dark with the city humming outside my window, I felt something I can only describe as returned. Like I had come back to a house I’d left years ago and found the lights still on.
How Being Single Helped Me Find Myself Again
It’s been six months now. I still have hard nights. Last week I came home from covering a late-breaking story, exhausted and wired, and the apartment was dark and quiet and for about thirty seconds I wanted someone — anyone — to be there. To ask how my day was. To hand me a glass of wine I didn’t choose.
But the feeling passed. And what replaced it wasn’t sadness. It was something more like recognition. I turned on the lamp. I made tea — chamomile, which it turns out I love and he hated, so we never had it. I sat at my kitchen table and read the news on my phone and then I put my phone away and just sat there. Drinking tea. Listening to the building settle. Being a person in a room, alone, and not lonely.
I don’t think being single is a waiting room anymore. I used to — I think most of us do. We treat it like the space between relationships, the boring hallway you have to walk through to get to the next real thing. But I’ve started to think of it as its own real thing. My Friday nights have a shape now. My mornings have a rhythm. I know how I like my eggs. I know what temperature I want the bedroom. I know what I want, full stop, in a way I haven’t since my twenties.
The other night I was at a dinner party and someone asked if I was seeing anyone. I said no, not right now. And they gave me that look — the sympathetic head tilt, the “don’t worry, you’ll find someone” look. And I wanted to say: I did find someone. I found myself. She was right here the whole time, buried under a decade of compromises I didn’t even know I was making.
But I didn’t say that. I just smiled and asked them to pass the wine. I chose the white.
There’s a quiet on the other side of loneliness that nobody tells you about. It’s not empty. It’s full — of your own breath, your own thoughts, your own hands on your own skin. It’s the sound of a wooden wick crackling at eleven p.m. on a Friday. It’s the weight of a novel on your chest as you fall asleep. It’s the simple, startling act of being a person who knows what she wants and isn’t apologizing for it.
I’m not going to pretend I have it all figured out. I still cry in the bathtub sometimes. I still reach for my phone to text someone who isn’t there. But those moments are getting shorter, and the space between them is getting richer. And on the good nights — which are most nights now — I lie in the center of my bed, in my quiet apartment, in the city I chose, and I feel something I’d almost forgotten was possible.
I feel at home.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: At 32, I Finally Learned How to Date Myself and How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
