Blog post 1 - Deciding to live alone

 Hi everyone and welcome to my first blog post on living alone. No, this is not going to be some really depressing blog about being lonely and having no one to move out with because I have no friends. Because this is not the case; or at least I hope not. But this is merely a guide to living alone coming from a young girl in her twenties who decided to make that decision and my take on the whole experience, showing that it really is not a bad thing. 

 

The decision to live alone was a decision I did not make lightly, and I suggest you do not either. I always had this vision in my head that I would be living with my best girlfriends, in our beautifully decorated flat, gossiping over a bottle of wine and a bowl of freshly made pasta, made with the groceries we bought together earlier in the week.

However, my views drastically changed, and I would be telling a lie if I said the pandemic did not have something to do with it. Being isolated for that length of time I became accustomed to my own space and having some time to myself. Now I am in no means someone who does not enjoy the company of others, quite frankly the opposite. But I also need my time alone, to not speak to other people and unwind the way I want to and that was something that really pushed me to living alone. 

 

But you really do need to think about all factors before making the ultimate decision and this is something I spent months thinking about. 

 

1)    Financial stability – could I really afford to do it? And I could. I had worked out all my costs and I could be able to afford it. But just because you can afford something doesn’t mean you are financially stable. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to live life the way I did at that time and spend care-free the way I did. And living alone would be much more costly than living with other people. But I was happy to make that sacrifice in order to gain the freedom of moving out. So ask yourself, are you willing to make that sacrifice?

2)    Loneliness – I will speak about this in much more detail, but it was a question that ran through my head, will I get lonely?

3)    Am I missing out on an experience? – this was something I spoke to a lot of people about. Would I miss out on the experience of living with my friends? It almost seems like a right of passage, to live with your friends while you’re young and carefree. I guess that’s a question I haven’t fully answered yet, but so far, I don’t feel like I am. 

 

These three points are factors I recommend really thinking about before making the jump to living alone. You don’t need to be 100% set on these as I definitely was not.