Why I Stopped Waiting for Someone to Come With Me
In the spring of 2022 (just after the world had begun to recover from COVID), I booked a last-minute trip to Tenerife with my aunt. On the surface it was sunshine and laughter. Underneath, I was reeling from a broken engagement and craving something I couldn't quite name: a reset on my own terms.
Shannon Kate Murray, in-flight (LHR → DXB), April 2022.
A few weeks later I booked a solo trip to Dubai. I wasn't chasing adventure or adrenaline. I just wanted to see if I could trust myself again.
As I slid into the back seat of a cab from the airport, the nerves arrived immediately. What was I thinking? Was this reckless? What if something goes wrong?
That trip became a turning point. Not because of the skyline views or the desert sunsets, but because I stepped into the world alone and discovered I still felt whole.
Growing up I was naturally reserved. I craved one-on-one connection but often forced myself into social settings that didn't fit, just to avoid being the girl alone in the corner. Solitude felt like something to escape rather than something to inhabit.
But over time that shifted.
Sitting with myself gave me clarity and, eventually, courage. Would I have launched this magazine without learning to be alone with my own thinking? Would I have flown to New Jersey for a coaching course, or taken ice skating lessons in a new town where I ended up building an unexpected community, and then moving? Probably not. But I did all of it. Because once you're genuinely comfortable in your own company, the things that used to feel like risks start to feel like choices.
There's a particular stigma still attached to women doing things alone. A man dining solo is independent. A woman doing the same is brave, sad, or waiting for someone. Pop culture has spent decades framing women alone as incomplete as if solitude is a problem to be solved rather than a state to be inhabited.
It isn't.
Going to a gallery alone, seeing a film with one ticket, sitting in a café with a book… these aren't acts of resignation. They're acts of freedom. And the awkwardness that comes with them at first fades much faster than you'd expect. Nobody is watching you with the attention you're imagining. Everyone is too absorbed in their own lives.
You don't need to book a flight to learn this. The muscle gets built in smaller moments: a walk without headphones, a class where you don't know anyone, lunch somewhere you've always wanted to try. Every small choice to back yourself builds capacity for the larger ones.
The documentary I was recently interviewed for (about the Essex Girl stereotype) didn't arrive from nowhere. It came from a long accumulation of small choices to show up, to speak, to take up space. The solo trip to Dubai was one of them. The ice skating lessons were another. The magazine was another.
None of it was planned. All of it was possible because I'd spent enough time in my own company to know what I actually wanted and to trust that I could go after it.
Being alone isn't a gap to fill. It's a chance to meet yourself fully. And when you do, the right people don't show up to complete your story; they show up to enrich a life that's already whole.