Perks of living alone

As people around are becoming more individualistic, the culture of moving out to live alone is gaining momentum, especially in students pursuing higher education. While most of us are no strangers to the various cons of this concept, we often overlook the pros which just might outweigh the cons. The following is a list to highlight the overshadowed perks-

Becoming more responsible: Growing up, most of us were brought up in a household surrounded by our loved ones, with help at our beck and call. Starting a life alone forces you to deal with the absence of such comforts and pushes you to learn to take up responsibility for yourself. This not only makes you better equipped for your future endeavours but also encourages you to start taking care of yourself as you come to realise how important your health is in order to carry the weight of the newfound responsibilities.

Learning more about yourself: This experience enables you to focus more time and energy on yourself than you would've done otherwise. You start getting to know yourself better — about your annoying habits, likes, dislikes — stuff you'd otherwise have never noticed closely before. Finally, you start becoming comfortable with your true self. This is when you achieve a new level of self-acceptance and people start appreciating you for the more genuine version of yourself that you've become.

Channelling creativity and discovering skills: You start taking up new hobbies of potential interest and find yourself more enthusiastic in signing up for new things. As a result, you start discovering hidden talents through such experimentations and if you stay adamant about learning you get to hone your skills further. This not only helps you grow to your fullest potential but also acts as a form of stress relief in times of high pressure.

Becoming more outgoing: As a result of the aforementioned actions you take up, you go out more and meet new people. As ironic as it seems, living alone results in you becoming more social and even if you were already the social kind, it helps you get out of your usual crowd and gel with new people with different backgrounds and personalities. You get the perfect balance of social interactions needed by humans to survive and then get to go home to your much needed alone time to cancel out the chaos.

Discover true freedom: Every human out there should get to experience true freedom at least once in the course of their lives. Yes, you'll probably make a ton of mistakes but the lessons you will learn from them will be far more valuable and memorable than anything you'd learn from a text book or from the warnings of the people around you.

Aside from the mentioned pros, there are the various small scale perks like not having to share your stuff with your roommate or sibling, getting your own space to work in peace without distractions whenever you want and the fact that you don't have to label leftover food as yours. As a whole, living alone might be a scary concept, but it is arguably a necessity of truly growing up into the person you'd be proud to become.

Veronica Gomes is a socially awkward sophomore. Feel free to trigger awkward encounters by reaching out to her at gomesveronica1997@gmail.com