In Defense of Laughing Alone
Your relationship with yourself is the longest you’ll ever have. You might as well make it a fun one.
Yesterday I taught a workshop on photo embroidery. About 10 of us clustered around a table in my little studio as I led the group through progressively more complicated stitches. My friend brought her daughter, who was struggling to nail a French knot (hard enough for adults to achieve on the first go, let alone a five-year-old!). After another of her French knots ended in a tangle, my friend’s daughter started blinking back tears.
And then a woman stitching beside her made a mistake while embroidering and laughed.
The girl’s mom—my friend—turned to her daughter and said, “See? Next time you make a mistake, just laugh.”
Laughing at ourselves reframes how we look at a situation—and isn’t only something to do when we’re around other people. If anything, I’d say it’s even more important to laugh at ourselves when we’re completely alone. All too often, we reserve laughter for our friends, and if we do laugh by ourselves, it’s generally because a movie or a video showed someone else being funny.
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- Accepting Your Fate (Finding Acceptance Alone)
- How Heather’s Lonely Year at Uni Became the Springboard to Her Greatest Adventures
- Did This French Guy Just Tell Us The Secret to Happiness?
Bringing light to darker moments
On my eighteenth birthday, I’d just transferred universities and was the new kid on a campus of 40,000, living solo what felt like moons away from the social hive of dorm life. Completely alone on my birthday, the North Florida rain was coming down in sheets. I was sprinting across the campus green from one class to the other, no umbrella, the rain soaking through my cutest birthday dress.
And then I slipped, cartoon-style, splatting right into a puddle of mud. In that second between shock and realization, I had a choice. On one hand, sure, I was alone on my birthday and covered in mud, and if there was any good time to have a birthday cry, that would’ve been it. But on the other hand, here I was, freshly a legal adult, and it was raining, and my dress was still cute, and mud was—is—fun. So I laughed.
A full body laugh, relishing the absurdity of the whole dang thing.
Eventually, someone passed by, rushing even as the rain let up, and I called out to them. “It’s my birthday!”
They kept walking, and I laughed again.
I don’t think about that moment often, but it comes to me in random turns, like earlier this week when I’d tried to sculpt a cauldron-style pen cup and it ended up a droopy mess, resembling a scrunched face or, as a friend later called it, “a grumpy tooth.”
When I saw the accidental frown I’d sculpted, I laughed pretty hard. And laughing about it made me realize that I love this droopy little not-cauldron I made. And now, I’m honestly very attached to it. But if I hadn’t given myself license to cackle, if I’d let frustration overtake me, I might not have even allowed myself to realize my project was a success, not a failure.
M
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Don’t just laugh at what’s around you—make yourself laugh
I won’t pretend that laughing by yourself changes your life or is the only trick to crafting a joyful future, but it does make your day a little kinder—something we could all benefit from.
But while it’s important to laugh off falling out of a yoga pose or baking a hideous cake, I think it may be even more important to practice the goofy, goofy act of trying to make ourselves laugh.
When we’re totally alone in the kitchen and have a funny thought, we don’t often give ourselves license to laugh aloud about it. And God forbid we decide to test out new voices or silly walks or crazy folds in our faces while totally alone. It seems to be—especially for women—that finding yourself funny is a grave faux pas.
But as someone who moved almost annually growing up, I had the privilege of spending a lot of time by myself. Between the ages of five and 12, I changed schools seven times, and I lived in seventeen different homes by the time I was eighteen. Most of the time, I was either in the throes of surface-level friendships with people I figured I’d only know for a year at best, or stumbling through trying my hand at cross-school or cross-country bonds in the early days of AOL Instant Messenger.
In short, I flew solo. A lot. But that time was a gift. Not only did it foster a strong sense of self, independent of what my peers might think—I was never in a clique long enough to lose my mind over popularity; I learned to laugh a lot by myself. Because who else was going to do it for me? Even now, that mentality carries through my daily life. If I have a funny idea—jotting down a crazy dream from the night before or repeating aloud a funny first line for a new short story or bending my body in a stupid new way in the mirror—I let myself laugh. Not just a chuckle—over as soon as it starts and almost shy about the space it claims—but a big, hearty cackle, unapologetic and a bit ugly, the sort reserved for a close friend.
Laugh with yourself like you would with a friend
Because ultimately, that’s what we should be to ourselves: friends. There’s nobody we will ever spend more time with, no relationship more permanent, than the one with ourselves. Even in a perfect marriage, you spend hours apart at work or running errands or commuting. The only person you spend every moment with—even your dreams? That’s you. So why not try to befriend yourself? Laughing improves your health and reduces pain and plain old feels good—so why not extend that kindness to yourself, just like you would your oldest friend?
When I laugh at—or with—myself, it slows down my brain, which is almost always humming like an old computer trying to process too many things at once. A solo laugh brings me back to the present and snaps whatever I’m doing into perspective. And by infusing self-generated levity into my day, I find I handle whatever’s been thrown my way with at least a little bit more ease.
If you’ve never really gotten into the habit of laughing by yourself, it no doubt feels goofy at first. The intimacy of a solo laugh can be almost embarrassing or feel performative. But if nobody’s around to witness it, then who cares? The more you show up for your goofy side when you’re all alone, the more natural it’ll feel. ‘Til one day, you’ll catch your own eye in the mirror and, instead of scrutinizing your latest wrinkle, you’ll pull a silly face, the ugliest and wildest you can muster, and you’ll laugh.
After all, this is the longest relationship you’ll ever have. You might as well make it a fun one.
Not comfortable laughing with yourself yet?
You can be.
Sign up for A Merry Loner’s 7-Day Do Things Alone Challenge to practice loving your Loner time.
Recommended Reading
- Why Are We All So Afraid of Being Alone?
- “Life Is Sad and Then You Die.”
- Ultimate Guide to Self Care: 100 Self-Care Ideas
- Alone at Night in Paris—Where to Take Yourself on a Solo Date
Nikita Andester (she/they) is an author and interdisciplinary artist based in Toulouse, France. She reads for Pulp Literature, is Assistant Competition Director of NYC Midnight, and runs Snail Mail Sweethearts, a newsletter on historical correspondence with a microfiction twist. Her fiction has recently appeared in The New Orleans Review, Bourbon Penn, and Typehouse Literary Magazine, among others, and her debut novel won the Pulp Literature 2024 First Page Cage competition. Talk with Nikita.
