Natalie Eve Garrett > Quotes

“My independence was still novel, and every day felt like an opportunity to indulge in my own company, to soak it in like a bubble bath.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories

“We’re told memories are best when they’re shared, but I’m saying sometimes it’s okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I’m saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“I walked an increasing number of miles per day. I was flagellating myself, circling the town like an anchorite. At the time I thought I was practicing good health. At the time I didn’t see I was seeking ways to manipulate my body, and the hours my body moved through, as a way to prevent myself from looking at the chaos.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“new pastime was making the quiet all right for myself, defining my boundaries so that I had space to dream. I made a list, on actual paper, of things I like to do, activities that bring me joy, pursuits that nourish me.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Why did the small deals all feel like big deals to me?”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things, too, but if I’d waited for them, I wouldn’t have done any of it.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“So often, women are conditioned to be people pleasers. To be the ones who keep things smooth and pleasant for everyone around them. I tell women to do these things for themselves because worrying so much about other people can smother the risk-taking part of your brain that writing needs. It’s a small thing. But in the dark theater, I learned that I didn’t need to look at someone else’s face lit by a screen to understand how to feel. My emotions are valid. Sometimes I can simply look into myself to know the world around me.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Maybe the impossibility of perfect togetherness, of perfect understanding, is what makes the search for connection so enticing, the moments of resonance so profound.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“When I tried to talk about my own specific fears and frustrations, I could always feel the distance between us. My friends, like the average rural white person, rarely had to consider how their race influenced their relationship to the world around them and themselves. Sometimes, I would complain about how it felt like everywhere I went, Somewhat-Well-Meaning and Not-At-All-Well-Meaning Adults were constantly bringing up the fact that I was Black. Teachers at school would say things that made it clear they worried that if I slightly wavered, I would be pregnant, or a drug addict, or waste all my potential. Nothing they said about being Black sounded anything like the life I was living. So many days felt like white adults were trying to make me a side character in the movie of their lives.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Sometimes I can simply look into myself to know the world around me.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Each day I went into the study and produced a thousand words, but there was something wrong with them, because there was something wrong with me.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Aloneness was a posture I was adopting, a crouch I was dropping into.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Back at home, even the landscape was crowded—furred with trees and personal history. Here I saw emptiness.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“I understood the truth that all traditions and orthodoxies—religious, philosophical, national, racial—amounted to little more than falsehoods that we must discard for an understanding of life in the moment.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“You beat back the day’s sorrow with cleanliness.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“I think,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,” “that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” Ha! Four hours! Clearly Thoreau did not own a smartphone.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“The natural beauty I saw while walking my dog—the frozen ponds and snowy beaches, the tender pale sunsets over whitecapped ocean—sometimes felt irrelevant, even discouraging, without anyone else to stand there with me and say something like, Wow, so pretty.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“When I tried to talk about my own specific fears and frustrations, I could always feel the distance between us. My friends, like the average rural white person, rarely had to consider how their race influenced their relationship to the world around them and themselves. Sometimes, I would complain about how it felt like everywhere I went, Somewhat-Well-Meaning and Not-At-All-Well-Meaning Adults were constantly bringing up the fact that I was Black. Teachers at school would say things that made it clear they worried that if I slightly wavered, I would be pregnant, or a drug addict, or waste all my potential. Nothing they said about being Black wounded anything like the life I was living. So many days felt like white adults were trying to make me a side character in the movie of their lives.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories

“I wanted to be someone different, someone who had nothing. That sounded like freedom.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“I tell women to go to the movies alone because there’s something I think contemporary women need at the beginning of their art lives maybe almost as much as money: that feeling of freedom, where you don’t have to consider other people or their needs, or the ability to cultivate a barometer of self-reliance that can come from even something as small as going to a theater by yourself, seeing something, and not feeling the urge to tilt your head and gauge the amount of fun other people are having.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“From within the enforced aloneness of quarantine, I’m dreaming of freely chosen solitude.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“We were aligned. A nation of two. Her allegiances were to me. People often remarked how we looked alike, how we argued like husband and wife.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Into the emptiness came a familiar, insistent thought: something was wrong with me. This wasn’t a new thought. It was a thought I’d been having for years, or decades. I shook it off as I’d taught myself to do. Mothers can’t sit around thinking shit like that.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“My imaginativeness was in part a product of all of this alone time, but it was also a balm for it: it was hard to be deeply lonely when surrounded by the hazy echoes of my former selves.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories

“When I look back at this period, I marvel at how much time I spent trying to make people like me. Trying somehow to convince them of me.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“I don’t think I’m actually immune—I don’t think anyone is—but at least I wasn’t afraid of being lonely anymore, and that was almost the same thing.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“Every day I circumnavigated the town. I felt most comfortable where the houses stopped and the scrubland started—on the streets in the middle of town I was confronted with people living their normal lives and felt my aloneness more keenly.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone

“If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: welcome.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories

“I wonder sometimes if the price of my heightened resistance to loneliness might be higher than I realize. I’m in the phase of life when there are a lot of weddings, a lot of first babies, when, to many, the absence of those things appears troublesome, even pitiable. People like to say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else, but that doesn’t seem true. I know plenty of people who hated being alone and whose happiness in finding a partner was magnified by relief. Their dislike, sometimes even horror, of being alone primed them for love, motivated them to commit. But if you’re actually happy alone, if you’ve accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone’s needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered. An acupuncturist, feeling my pulse, said he could tell I was an armored person. I asked my mom later if she thought I was armored, and she laughed like, duh. Would I be able to tell the difference between contentment and armor? It seems like one should be light and the other heavy, but you can get used to weight, not even notice it after a while.”
― Natalie Eve Garrett, The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone