My Evening Self-Care Ritual: How I Learned to Love Solitude

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.

My Evening Self-Care Ritual: How I Learned to Love Solitude

By Margot, 48 — Savannah, GA

My evening self-care ritual started with a single candle and a silence I didn’t know what to do with. Two years ago, after my marriage ended and the house emptied out, I found myself standing in my own living room at seven o’clock on a Wednesday, realizing I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with a quiet night. I’d spent twenty years filling evenings with other people’s needs — dinner schedules, homework battles, the constant negotiation of shared space. Suddenly all that space was mine, and it terrified me.

I’m Margot. I’m forty-eight, I design interiors for a living, and for the longest time I could make anyone’s home feel warm except my own.

The Night I Stopped Filling the Silence

The first few months alone, I did what I think a lot of women do — I kept the television on. Not because I was watching anything, but because the sound of other voices made the rooms feel less enormous. I’d eat standing at the kitchen counter, scrolling my phone, half-listening to some cooking competition I’d already seen. Then I’d shower, get in bed, and stare at the ceiling until sleep came. It wasn’t sadness exactly. It was more like I’d forgotten how to be a person without an audience.

One evening in late October, there was a storm. The power went out for about three hours. I lit a candle — one of those thick pillar candles I’d bought for a client’s staging and never returned — and sat at the dining table with nothing to do. No screen. No noise. Just the rain against the windows and this warm, unsteady light. I remember noticing the way the shadows moved across the table, the way the flame responded to my breath when I leaned forward. I’m an interior designer. I think about light every single day. But I hadn’t really looked at it — just looked at it, without purpose — in years.

I sat there for the full three hours. When the power came back on, I turned everything off again and kept the candle going until it guttered out. Something about that small, deliberate flame felt like permission. Permission to just be in my own house, doing nothing productive, and letting that be enough.

Building an Intentional Living Routine After Divorce

After that night, I started lighting a candle every evening. Same time — around seven, when the light outside starts going amber here in Savannah. I’d pour a glass of something, usually just sparkling water with lemon, and I’d sit. Sometimes I’d read. Sometimes I’d sketch — not for work, just shapes, patterns, the curve of the banister I could see from my chair. Sometimes I did absolutely nothing.

It felt ridiculous at first. I’m a grown woman. I run a business, I manage contractors, I argue with suppliers about lead times on Italian tile. And here I was, treating a candle like it was some kind of sacred object. But the ritual held me. It gave the evening a shape that wasn’t just the absence of someone else.

I started paying more attention to other small things too. I bought better sheets — not expensive, just ones I actually liked the feel of. I started cooking real dinners again, for one, which felt radical in a way I can’t fully explain. There’s something about chopping garlic and hearing oil pop in a pan that makes you feel like you’re living on purpose. I rearranged the bedroom so the bed faced the window instead of the closet. I’d spent years designing other people’s bedrooms to feel like sanctuaries and mine had been an afterthought.

Perimenopause was happening in the background of all this, which nobody warns you about when you’re also trying to reassemble your identity. My body was doing strange things — the night sweats, the sudden dryness, the way my skin seemed to belong to someone else. My doctor was helpful and matter-of-fact about it. She said something I keep coming back to: “Your body isn’t breaking down. It’s reorganizing.” That reframe stuck. I wasn’t falling apart. I was being rearranged.

What I Learned About Self-Care in Solitude

Somewhere in that first winter alone, a friend gave me a wellness device from HiMoment. She wrapped it in tissue paper and handed it to me over lunch like it was a book she’d enjoyed, casual and unbothered. “For your evening ritual,” she said, and raised an eyebrow. I laughed, but I also took it home. And I’ll say this: at forty-eight, after two decades of prioritizing everyone else’s comfort, there was something almost defiant about learning what I actually liked. Not what I’d tolerated or performed or gone along with, but what genuinely felt good, on my own terms, in my own time.

That’s the thing about solitude that surprised me. I expected loneliness, and some nights it was exactly that. But more often, what I found was a kind of honesty I hadn’t had access to in years. When you’re alone, really alone, there’s nobody to perform for. No one to accommodate. You can eat cereal for dinner or take a forty-minute bath or cry in the kitchen for no clear reason and none of it requires explanation. You can light a candle at seven o’clock and sit in its glow and just breathe, and that can be the whole evening, and it can be good.

I started thinking of my evenings as a room I was designing. What did I want in it? What was the mood? Not the aspirational, Instagram version of solitude — not the cashmere throw and the perfectly frothy matcha — but the real one. My version included mismatched socks, a novel I’d been reading for three months, a candle that smelled like cedar and smoke, and the particular quiet of a house that holds only one heartbeat. I found I didn’t need to fill it. I just needed to furnish it with things that felt true.

How My Evening Ritual Changed My Relationship with Myself

It’s been two years now. The candle ritual has shifted and settled, the way any living practice does. Some nights it’s five minutes of quiet before I go back to my laptop. Some nights it stretches into an entire evening of slow, deliberate nothing. I’ve added things — a particular playlist, a journal I write in only when I feel like it, a stretch routine my physical therapist taught me when my back seized up from too many hours on job sites. But the candle is always the anchor. It’s the thing that says: the workday is over. You are home. You are here.

My daughter visited last month — she’s twenty-two, finishing grad school in Atlanta. She arrived on a Friday evening and found me at the dining table with my candle and my sketchbook. “Mom,” she said, half laughing, “you look like a painting.” She sat down across from me, and I lit a second candle. We didn’t talk for a while. We just sat in the warm, flickering quiet, and it was one of the best evenings I’ve had in this house.

I used to think that being alone meant something had gone wrong. That solitude was just the space between connections, the waiting room before the next relationship or the next obligation. But I think now that it’s a room of its own — one I get to design, and redesign, as many times as I need. The candle isn’t magic. It’s just fire and wax. But what it represents, for me, is the decision to be present in my own life. To stop waiting for the evening to become something, and to let it be what it already is.

Some nights, what it is, is just a woman sitting alone in good light, breathing. And that is more than enough.

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