I’ve always been a person who needs a lot of alone time. I could spend hours and hours by myself and be fine with it. It’s always been essential that I spend a lot of time with myself. Don’t get me wrong – I am not a wallflower nor do I shy away from social situations. In fact, a lot of people don’t know this about me. Of course, my husband, close friends, and ex-roommates do. It’s just that, say, after a party or something, I need at least a few days of alone time to make up for all that socializing. I don’t really do much in my alone time either. I read, play computer games, eat. I write emails. Surf the web.

For the most part, my husband has learned to accept this about me and allow me to have time to myself at least a little bit every day. Since we had kids, it’s been harder to find time to myself, but I made the boys stick to an early bedtime so I can have a few hours alone before turning in myself.

When I started working from home, people would ask me if I missed having social interaction or if I ever got lonely. I’d answer truthfully: “No”. I would have lunch with either my husband or with a friend on occasion and of course I’d be with my husband all night and that was enough for me. In fact, because I am married and have two little kids, I relished being home alone all day.

Recently, I started a new job that requires me to go into the office every day. It’s been over 3 weeks now and I find that I am DYING for alone time. I have been going to sleep later and later to get it, which isn’t so good. In previous residences, my alone time would be either in the office or in my bedroom. But this place is so tiny that the “office” is in the living room, and our bedroom is unpleasant and claustrophobic. When I worked from home, that was all fine since I got the place to myself for over 8 hours a day, but now that I don’t have that, it’s killing me. I find that I’m becoming crankier each day. That could also be the sleep deprivation as well.

There’s really no point to this post other than to say I need to come up with a way to be alone for a couple hours every day. Maybe by making the bedroom nicer to be in? Or taking a two-hour long bath each night? Or, more drastically, pressuring my husband to agree to move to a new place? I don’t know.