Trepidation is the word of the day.

I am told that I will be able to really start moving everthing over to my new place this week. I am excited, really excited, but I am also really worried. I am a pretty chickenshit person. I am not sure how well I will do staying in a house with no one else in it. I have never spent any length of time living alone. There has always been another person living in the same building. I lived at school for a year, but I was sharing an apartment with three other girls. It didn't bother me at all when they weren't home because I knew that there were people above and below and just down the hall from me. In England it was similar. There were other people in the building all the time because it was a dorm. Even when I went to Glasgow by myself, I stayed in a hostel and there were other people in the same room, let alone the building. That was a little strange in itself but I was "other Jessy" for that weekend anyway so I dealt with it fairly well.

There have only been a handful of times I have been completely alone in a building at night. My parents don't really go anywhere very often and it is even less often that they go somewhere at the same time. There have probably been only a handful of nights that they have been gone that I have been home since my brother moved out three years ago. On those nights, I have usually slept on the couch, or practically forced my dog to sleep in my room. I know that I can take the dog with me for the first few weeks but I doubt that she will want to stay there for very long. She is very attached to my father and would miss him if she lived with me.

I feel pretty pathetic, 24 years old and I am not comfortable being alone in the house overnight. Even more pathetic that my uncle lives next door and my parents are across the street. I guess it is just that I don't have much experience with being alone in a building.

But now that I think about it, how many people really do? Especially young people. When you are a kid, you live with your parents. Most parents don't just leave their kids alone overnight until they are teens. Most teens even go to a friend's house when their parents go away. At most they would be home alone for just a few days. Then you go away to college. You are most likely in a dorm, usually with a roomate. Dorms are filled with people. Even on holidays when most people go home, there are still three or four who stay, and also RAs and such around. You might also get an apartment, but the same rules apply there. You may or maynot have a roomate but there are always downstairs or upstairs or nextdoor neighbors around you. Few young people have the money to rent or buy a house on their own. So there is almost always a housemate or partner involved. As much as I would like it, my boyfriend and I are probably not going to be living together for quite a while. So, from sometime next week until whenever we actually do move in together, I am stuck living alone. Most people don't live alone until they are either divorced, or a spouse dies. There are a rare few who choose to live alone, but that is their own choice.

Trepidation is the word of the day because I chose to live alone without really understanding what that means. I guess I'd better get used to it.