I just found this in a paper by Michael Pafford (1975, Entwistle / How Students Learn) and think it’s something that I can relate to, on some level. What’s your opinion?
“In my childhood and more particularly during my teens I sought solitude: it was a matter of choice not necessity. I was seldom unhappy and had many friends and enjoyable pastimes in the gregarious life of home and boarding-school, yet I needed, with a need almost like hunger or thirst, to escape on my own at frequent intervals. At first this need was unconscious and then, by degrees, rather than at any time I can pin down, I recognised its symptoms. All the closer friends I had in my later schooldays shared to some extent this quirk of temperament. We never talked about what we did with our solitude and yet some kind of understanding existed. It was as if there was a tacit agreement that our social selves were our superficial selves, that our real selves were private ,not to be talked about with-out embarrassment,. and that everyday language was inadequate for our real preoccupations. What we did talk about I do not know, but I am sure our conversation was trivial, facetious, sarcastic and freely sprinkled with slang and obscenity. We emphatically did not seek each other out as soul-mates to whom we could unbosom ourselves.”