Solo living offered sanctuary after mental ill health. Then came our coronavirus summer, and I felt a new yearning for community
When I moved into my tiny top-floor studio flat in 2018, it was a blank page. After the removal men had gone, I stood in the middle of the one-room apartment, just me and my boxes and bed linen in bin bags, and worked out I could walk the length of the place in nine steps. Still, it was mine, just mine (for as long as I was willing to pay the extortionate rent).
For the previous eight months, I had been living on a blow-up bed in a box room in the home of my enormously generous friends and their baby son. After a lengthy period of mental ill health (with a stint in a psychiatric hospital followed by a bad breakup and a period of unemployment), I was taken in by my friends, who treated me as one of the family and helped me heal. When it was time to move on, I thought living alone would give my mental health the best chance of continued recovery. It could be a retreat, a place where I didn’t have to pretend to be well, or sane, if I wasn’t. A place where I didn’t have to “belong”.
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