Alonetude represents a positive, integrated relationship with being alone, where one feels at home with oneself, regardless of physical company.
The concept of being alone typically occupies two opposing shores in our cultural imagination: the painful isolation of loneliness or the romanticized retreat of the solitary genius. During my thirty days by the Sea of Cortez, I sought a different territory, which I term alonetude. Alonetude represents a positive, integrated relationship with being alone, where one feels at home with oneself, regardless of physical company. This blog post explores the methodology of alonetude through the lens of Nash’s Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), a framework that bridges personal experience with scholarly rigour.
Figure: Alonetude
Created: Dalle 3, AI Image Generator, 2026
The SPN Framework: Bridging Self and Scholarship
Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) provides a unique “third space” where analytical reasoning and personal authenticity intersect. Unlike traditional academic writing that demands detachment, SPN validates the researcher’s situatedness as a strength. This methodology treats lived experience as data, subjected to the same thematic synthesis as empirical materials. My inquiry into alonetude utilized a four-phase process:
- Pre-Search: I began by aligning my internal motivations with SPN’s methodological commitments, identifying the core thematic concern of intentional solitude.
- Me-Search: This phase involved a structured excavation of my own life, gathering raw fragments and vignettes from my time in Loreto to serve as the central field text.
- Re-Search: I moved toward deliberate engagement with existing scholarship, such as self-determination theory and polyvagal theory, to contextualize my emerging themes.
- We-Search: Finally, I translated my personal “I” into a collective “we,” offering thematic patterns and moral insights that resonate across varied life contexts.
Core Principles
The SPN methodology is operationalized through the VPAS model: vulnerability, perspective, action, and scholarly engagement (Nash, 2004). Each element informed my cultivation of alonetude.
Perspective transforms personal disclosure into something intelligible for an audience by embedding it in conceptual contexts. I framed my experiences against the “capacity to be alone,” a concept from Donald Winnicott (1958) that suggests aloneness is safe when one feels held by something larger. This interpretive layer ensures the narrative remains grounded in a broader human experience.
Vulnerability functions as an epistemic tool, enabling the writer to critically reinterpret moments of personal significance. In Loreto, this meant practicing self-interrogation and confronting the internal noise that surfaced when external distractions subsided. Vulnerability is selective; it serves the thematic throughline rather than standing as an isolated anecdote.
Action represents the translational moment where insights inform choices and behaviours. Cultivating alonetude required intentional shifts in practice, such as “mornings without performance” and “watching without comment.” These actions were enactments of meaning-making that altered my daily routines.
Scholarly engagement ensures that narrative meaning-making is intellectually valuable to the broader community. I integrated research on affective self-regulation to explain how volitional solitude supports well-being. This embeddedness enables individual trajectories to serve as sites for theory testing and expansion.
Reading the Body as Archive: A Counter-Archival Practice
A central pillar of my methodology involves reading the body as an archive. This concept positions the corporeal form as a repository of lived experience, challenging traditional archival paradigms that privilege textual documentation (Derrida, 1996).
By treating the body as a site of knowledge, I engaged in a counter-archival practice. This approach recognizes that bodies retain past experiences, particularly traumatic or transformative ones, as implicit somatic memories (Van der Kolk, 2014). My methodology utilized several tools to document this embodied archive:
- Somatic Logs: Documenting physiological and sensory shifts during the 30-day retreat.
- Visual Witnesses: Using photography to capture the “soft fascination” of the environment, which facilitates attention restoration (Kaplan, 1995).
- Intertextual Journals: Connecting scholarly reading to lived, felt experiences in real-time.
This framework is supported by Polyvagal Theory, which suggests that a state of felt safety, the ventral vagal state, is required to access these deep somatic archives (Porges, 2022). In the quiet of the Sea of Cortez, the absence of threat allowed the “neuroception” of safety to activate, enabling a downregulation of defensive states and an opening of the embodied record.
The Portability of Alonetude
The ultimate goal of this methodology is universalizability: the capacity for a narrative to evoke recognition across contexts. Alonetude is a portable internal posture that remains available regardless of external circumstances. By employing the SPN and reading the body as an archive, researchers can bridge the gap between inner truth-telling and public knowledge-making. This process reveals that the home we seek is often found within ourselves, preserved in the very tissues of our being.
Figure: Burnout
Credit: NotebookLM, 2026
References
Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
