The Company I Keep

I've spent much of my life living comfortably inside opposites.

I am social yet solitary.

Alone, yet never lonely.

Equally at home in a crowded room or a quiet corner.

For years, I assumed everyone moved through the world this way.

I love cafés where conversations spill from one table to the next, airports buzzing with thousands of strangers, and dinner parties that linger long after dessert. I also love quiet hotel rooms overlooking unfamiliar cities, afternoons with nowhere to be, and the rare luxury of hearing nothing but my own thoughts. Neither has ever felt like the opposite of the other. One fills me with energy; the other restores it.

It wasn't until much later that I realized my comfort with both solitude and company wasn't as universal as I'd assumed.

Looking back, I think I know where that comfort first took root.

People hear the words only child and immediately begin filling in the blanks. Spoiled. Bratty. Bossy. Lonely. I've heard every version over the years, usually delivered with a knowing smile from someone convinced they understand my childhood before I've said another word.

The truth is, my childhood wasn't defined by what I lacked. It was shaped by what I had.

On rainy afternoons, while the world outside softened beneath gray skies, I claimed a corner of our sofa as if it were my own small studio. Colored pencils rolled beneath the coffee table. Spirograph gears clicked together in precise, perfect circles. Lite-Brite pegs glowed like tiny constellations after the lights were turned off. Play-Doh became villages, and poster board became imaginary countries with flags, maps, and histories only I understood.

Hours disappeared without my noticing.

I wasn't escaping into those worlds. I was discovering that I could build one.

Our three-bedroom house sat in Trenton's Villa Park neighborhood. My grandparents had begun their married life there, and my mother had been born there before me. It held my family's history long before it held mine, yet it became the place where I began creating a world of my own.

The neighborhood was full of children, especially girls, and summer afternoons belonged to whoever happened to have the fullest yard that day. We rode bicycles until dusk, invented games with rules that changed hourly, and wandered from porch to porch until our mothers called us home.

I loved every minute of it.

When the bicycles disappeared and the sidewalks grew quiet, I never felt the silence closing in around me. It felt expansive, as though someone had opened another door. I remember sitting quietly on the front steps at dusk, a Mason jar beside me where a handful of fireflies blinked like tiny lanterns. I wasn't waiting for someone to come back outside or wondering what I was missing. I was simply watching the evening settle over our block, listening to the chorus of crickets, perfectly content to be alone with my thoughts.

Solitude wasn't something to endure until people returned. It was another place where life happened.

Looking back, I think that's one of the quiet gifts my parents gave me. They filled our home with books, art supplies, maps, conversations, and curiosity.

My mother was an only child too, and I sometimes wonder if that comfort with solitude was something she passed down to me—not through genetics alone, but through the example she set. Perhaps she understood, without ever saying so. She never treated my quiet moments as something that needed fixing. Instead, she gave them room to grow.

Saturday mornings often ended with my mother and me at the library two blocks away, tucked inside Trenton High School. I can still remember the slightly musty scent of book jackets, the quiet rustle of pages turning, and the sunlight streaming through the windows onto the tables where we sat. I never left with just one book. I carried home a stack of possibilities, each one waiting to transport me somewhere new.

I devoured them one by one in the stillness of my room, where my imagination could wander as far as it wanted.

Somewhere between those rainy afternoons, library Saturdays, and neighborhood summers, I discovered that the first company I would ever keep was my own.

I didn't realize then how far that lesson would travel with me.

College was the first time I noticed that not everyone experienced solitude the way I did. Friends dreaded evenings alone, filling every quiet hour with plans. I looked forward to afternoons with nowhere to be, just as much as I anticipated meeting everyone for dinner later. That was when I began to realize that being comfortable in my own company wasn't something everyone took for granted.

Today, I can spend an entire day wandering through a city halfway around the world without speaking to another soul and feel completely alive. I notice the sound of footsteps echoing down narrow streets, the smell of bread drifting from an open bakery door, the way afternoon light settles against old stone buildings.

And yet, by evening, I might be laughing over dinner with friends. Neither experience feels incomplete without the other. The quiet moments allow me to absorb the world; the shared moments allow me to celebrate it.

I've come to believe that solitude and connection aren't opposites at all. One deepens the other. The quiet teaches me to pay attention; the people remind me why it matters.

When someone discovers I'm an only child, they still give me that familiar look, as though they've finally found the explanation for who I am.

Perhaps they have, though not in the way they expect. Being an only child didn't teach me how to be alone. It taught me that my own company was never something to escape.

I've carried that lesson everywhere—from neighborhood sidewalks to cities half a world away. It has allowed me to enjoy a crowded table without fearing the quiet that follows, and to embrace solitude without mistaking it for loneliness.

I've spent my life keeping company with both the world and myself, and I've never felt the need to choose between them.

Danielle Barber

Author’s Note: This blog supports a memoir-in-progress. The essays published here stand on their own and do not represent the full narrative, which continues to unfold.