Being the only child of a single mum - at least during my first 7 years - loneliness was always the Justin Bieber to my Selena Gomez: my favourite toxic teenage relationship.

Being alone always seemed like a worse fate than Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s karma, so I made up thousands of excuses to surround myself with people who came and went from my life like theatre actors: they never coincided with each other, never stayed for long, and it seemed normal to me to form bonds that were never solid enough because being my own best friend always seemed like a distant idea and - let’s be honest - a very uncool one.

As you grow up, it seems more important to build relationships with everyone except yourself, because without a boyfriend or friends, the only thing we have in abundance is ourselves, and for some reason, we’re terrified of looking in the mirror and keeping ourselves company on Friday nights. At least that’s what I thought and felt for years.

I never really understood why I had to apply the “be your own hero” mantra until the day I came home crying, and my only company was a can of Diet Coke, a chicken lasagna, and the third - or fourth - season of Pretty Little Liars. That’s when I first realised that when I was alone, I wasn’t necessarily abandoned or lost. I was more accompanied than at any party, gathering, or any situation that involved being with other people.

Little by little, I accepted that being alone wasn’t a punishment, but a demonstration of love; something like when we’re browsing our favourite online shop and we buy ourselves a gift because we deserve it, we need it, and why not? Because we feel like it. However, life isn’t a teen romantic movie where 10 years pass in 10 minutes and when we open our eyes, we’re these mature women who understand everything, so I always went back to my toxic trait: I stopped loving myself and feeling that I was enough, to need the company of people I wasn’t even sure if I liked (or if they liked me).

Like 'Jelena' and 'Zanessa', my relationship with loneliness became an endless back-and-forth, so much so that it seemed like a yo-yo: I no longer had control over how I felt about myself, and at some point, I began to hate myself. I hated myself because I couldn’t spend half an hour alone without feeling like that’s how the rest of my life would be, I hated myself because I demanded from others a love I wasn’t capable of giving myself; and if I didn’t love myself, why would I have the moral authority to ask others to love me? Hypocrisy at its finest.

As the years went by, I felt more and more alone and reached that breaking point we all reach in our toxic relationships: I told myself enough was enough. I sat in front of the mirror and became my own hero when I dried my tears, forced myself to take a shower so I could comb my hair and put on makeup, ordered a pizza, and put ‘The Proposal’ on Netflix; in short, I did what you do with the guy you like: I invited myself to do something I liked and pampered myself like I should have done a long time ago. 

From then on, I began to let go of my desire to fit in everywhere, my eagerness to be friends with everyone. When in reality I was everyone’s buddy, but no one’s friend, and my bad habit of not valuing the love of those who were always real because I wanted the love of those I thought should love me just because we shared something as small as being in the same course. I understood that loving myself should be my top priority and not my greatest fear.

And that’s when you realise you’ve grown up and you really are the empowered woman who can still be afraid of many things, but her own company is no longer one of them. Obviously, one thing doesn’t cancel out the other: I’m still the girl who loves to be cuddled, or the friend who organises plans and offers her house for us to gossip until 3 am. I’m just a girl who learned that boundaries are healthy, and it’s necessary to enjoy your own company to be able to enjoy others.

Because in the end, it’s all part of growing up. We need to stop believing that our worth is measured by the number of unread chats we have on WhatsApp. We need to learn that choosing to stay home to make ourselves a tea and go to bed early instead of going out to party is sometimes the best choice, and giving up what harms us, no matter how attached we are to it is a great act of self-love. Let’s make peace with ourselves and remember that we’ll always have a friendly shoulder to cry on; our own.

Let’s set aside the idea that being alone is something bad and take a moment to put our hand on our hearts and apologise for all the times we accepted less love than we deserved out of fear of being alone. After all, if Katy Perry and Taylor Swift made up and became friends again, we can do the same with our loneliness.