Take a deep breath. 

You’ve finished your week. It was stressful, but you got through alive. 

You want to drink, forget about all your stresses and have a good time on a great Friday night — whatever that may look like. But, you want to do it with people. Because who doesn’t want to do it with people?

You text your roster, hoping that any of them will be willing to get into something tonight.

They’re all doing something. Damn it.

You see what your roommates are up to, hoping they might want to go to Northgate or just drink and have some fun. 

They’re all doing things that do not include having fun. 

You text your other friends, hoping that they might be in the same situation as you — alone on a Friday night. They’re doing things too.  

So what do you resort to? Drinking by yourself and maybe watching a movie or binging a TV show?

For some, this is the worst-case scenario on a Friday night. But for me, it’s the greatest thing ever. 

I’ve always been alone. I had friends growing up — I’m not a loner — but I liked being by myself; I get anxious in a social environment, and any type of social interaction just pushes my limits of what I can handle. So, I generally grew to being by myself more, which I was fine with. 

What I’ve found from this experience of loneliness is that I’m not actually lonely. Loneliness     is “being without company;” there’s nothing that says loneliness is an after-effect of everything going wrong, causing you to be lonely. 

Most people think of being lonely as being in a room by themselves, depressed and hating everything. But this simply isn’t the case. 

When did loneliness become a bad thing? When did the value of our social lives exceed the importance of being alone? Why do we view this as punishment?  

Loneliness is not a consequence of disappointment in your social life. 

What do the movies tell us is the ideal college life? Party all the time and act like there’s no tomorrow. This image has been ingrained in our heads since our teenage years and we’ve come to the point where if you’re not blacking out every single day, you’re doing college wrong. 

I’m here to tell you that you aren’t doing it wrong. There is no right answer. Being alone is as important as having a social life. 

Now, I’m not asking you to be alone all the time. Being by yourself can get incredibly depressing if you do it too much. But, as college students, we are so susceptible to the idea of our entire college life needing to be this great, big and continuous event where every single day we must be doing things that live up to this stereotypical college life that everyone is apparently having. 

People who look at isolation as a consequence seem to think that whenever something goes wrong in their life, they need to do something. They itch to not be alone. They go to the clubs and get blackout drunk to try and forget about everything because they can’t sit down with themselves and deal with their emotions head-on. 

If we aren’t happy with ourselves on the inside, how are we supposed to convince others that we are happy?

And I’m not talking just about going out to bars; nerds, I’m talking to you too. Students who participate in 7,000 different organizations suffer from this too. Filling up your schedule to avoid spending time alone will make you lose yourself as much as those going to the clubs. 

Yes, it’s fun walking around campus and seeing people you know in your academic clubs and talking to them — I love doing that too, it makes me feel important. 

But, you know what’s even more fun? Being happy with who you are, apart from the organizations and extracurriculars you’re a part of. 

At some point, you’re going to be lost in all these activities and lose yourself in the process. No amount of social interaction can amount to the value of cherishing what you can provide for yourself. 

This is an epidemic among college students and it must be cured. 

Some might have a hard time sitting down and figuring themselves out, but that’s exactly what your college career is meant for: discovering who you are and exploring what you like. This absolutely must include that alone time as well as time in social environments. 

It’s like maintaining your health — you should eat healthy, exercise and take your daily supplements to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The same goes for finding yourself. You should go out and try new things, but most importantly have time to yourself. 

So, as I’m sitting here drinking my glass of wine, alone, I am happy. Yes, I’ll probably go out tomorrow and have a good time, but not because I need to. What I need is to be content with myself. I’m not going out to find myself or to be content, because I’ve already found it. 

Once you learn to use your isolation for good, you’ll be able to find the happiness that you’re looking for. 

Joshua Abraham is a kinesiology junior and opinion writer for The Battalion.