Some people are incredibly busy, as you’ve probably noticed. There’s always something going on around them: people to attend to, work to catch up on, phones that never stop ringing. Even when they’re alone at home, they can’t truly be alone. Messages keep arriving, notifications keep chiming; the crowd continues to exist, only in a different form.
Being involved in life is, of course, beautiful—but this constant busyness can slowly wear someone down from within. Maybe that’s why these people often say, “I just can’t ever be alone.” Sometimes it’s followed by a sigh: “I can’t find time to clear my head, I’m always busy with something.” But right there, the sentence shifts, takes a turn, and transforms into a subtle defense: “But things wouldn’t run this smoothly if I wasn’t here.” In this piece, I want to look more closely at what it is that’s really not working. Are these things that truly need to be handled, or are they something else entirely—something unnamed?
Yes, we may want to pause, to stay quiet, to be alone. Without speaking, without rushing to catch up, without answering anyone… But strangely, that silence can sometimes bring a chill. It’s as if while we crave solitude, we also run from it. We want to be alone because we’re tired, and yet when we finally are, we rush to fill the space with noise again.
Yet in those moments, we actually don’t need to do anything. We don’t need to manage anyone, rush anywhere, or suppress anything. And it’s exactly then—perhaps precisely because of this—that we find ourselves facing something even more exhausting. When the noise of the outside world fades, all that remains is our own mind. And the longer we’ve kept our thoughts buried, the louder they emerge. Sometimes it’s the leftover ache of an unfinished conversation. Sometimes it’s a disappointment we’ve avoided for years. One by one, they all start showing up. When the mind quiets, the heart begins to speak—from the very place it was last silenced. Even when we say we want to be alone, we often take a step back—because we don’t really know what we’ll be left alone with. That silence, which we imagine as rest, can feel more like disarray once we’re in it. And maybe that’s why being alone with ourselves is what we fear most. The noise of others may tire us, yes, but the silence of our own voice feels heavier. Because in that space, there’s no filter. No distraction. No mask. No denial. There, it’s not so easy to ignore a repressed feeling or hush a wound we’ve neglected. That’s why pretending to want solitude is easier—safer—than actually embracing it. Because no matter how much we long for stillness, deep down, we know we might not be able to bear it. Because silence isn’t rest; it’s hearing ourselves. And so we turn again to a little noise, a little distraction, a little busyness… All of it is like a thin veil drawn across the mind. It doesn’t block what’s behind it, but it delays the view. It turns the truth into a faint silhouette. Shapes blur, colors fade… But still—something is there. A weight that sits behind the veil, not fully visible, but undeniably present.
One of the people who expressed this most clearly is existential psychotherapist Rollo May. May (1953) puts it this way: “Many people suffer from the fear of finding themselves alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all” (p. 17). When I first read this, the thought lingered in my mind for a long time. That the fear of being alone can distance us from ourselves… It sounds abstract at first, doesn’t it? But later I realized—maybe the issue isn’t solitude or the lack of it. Maybe it isn’t even about being alone with ourselves. Maybe it’s about not being ready to actually find ourselves. Because finding ourselves isn’t always some romantic, meaningful discovery. Sometimes, it doesn’t show us what we lost—it shows us what we’ve ignored. Sometimes, we catch ourselves in a version we never wanted to see. And not wanting to see that version naked means we don’t feel ready to see it at all. It becomes easier to lack the courage to face ourselves, or to acknowledge what we truly want. Because when that courage is absent, it’s not solitude that becomes impossible—but confrontation.
When we’re too afraid to break away from the crowd and return to ourselves—when we just can’t—everything speeds up. It moves fast, ends fast, gets forgotten fast. We get lost in doing things without knowing what or why. And in that pace, we try to push ourselves further away from that creeping fear. Because that fear might show up the moment we start to think. And what is it, exactly? It’s the fear that the life we’re living isn’t actually ours. That all these decisions, habits, and actions… might not belong to us. That everything has been shaped for others—for circumstances, expectations—and we’ve merely gone along for the ride. And that awareness arrives at a point where we can’t go back.
Last month, when I was writing about the self, I found myself circling back to this. I had said that discovering who we are isn’t about finding, but about weaving—bit by bit. That what we call the self isn’t fixed, but fluid… that it is formed as we live, decide, and change.
Now, looking at this piece, I want to say this: even that process of building can get lost in the very intensity we’ve trapped ourselves in. When we don’t think, when we don’t know why we do what we do, even the stones we lay along our path stop feeling like they’re ours. They’re just there to keep the road going. And when we look back, we’re left asking: “Did I even build this path myself?” That fear—the one I mentioned earlier—appears again. Just like when our choices don’t feel like ours, everything feels like it might collapse if even one piece slips out of place.
But maybe, there’s something we’ve forgotten, hidden behind those fears and the moments we avoid being alone or facing ourselves. That the self we’ve buried under all that noise isn’t as fixed as we thought. Like our essence, it’s a structure in motion—shaped by how we grow. Sometimes shifting, sometimes returning, sometimes familiar, sometimes foreign. And if we don’t look at it—if we don’t catch it—we won’t see what it’s becoming. And when we don’t see that, we can’t see how much we’ve changed. We can’t see where we were yesterday and where we are now. As we grow, we miss the chance to witness our own growth—to feel proud, to support ourselves—the child, the teenager, the adult we are and have been. But we all need that—recognition, being seen, being held. Wouldn’t it be unfair to offer that compassion to everyone else around us, while withholding it from ourselves?
When we realize this, we begin to see that being there for that version of us as it grows is actually something we can do. That even after all the chaos, the noise, the avoidance—we still have one thing left: the chance to look inward. To step away from everything, and see that fluid self. Because maybe it’s not about how much we’ve changed—but about catching ourselves in the act of changing. Being able to say, “This is who I was—and this is who I’ve become.” We don’t have to stay fixed in any one version of ourselves. But when we do catch it—those moments of estrangement, and the ones that feel like home again—we get to witness something real. Because sometimes, a person deserves to be held close, just to see what’s going on in there. Looking inward isn’t about solving everything. It starts simply by seeing—without missing what’s unfolding. Maybe the point isn’t full understanding. Maybe it’s just daring to hear who we are, right where we are.