Sunset at the horizon.
The evening I arrived in Loreto, Mexico, I stood on the malecón watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez, and I felt something I could not name.
It wasn’t loneliness, though I was profoundly alone, 3,000 kilometres from home, knowing no one, with thirty days of solitude stretching before me. Neither was it the comfortable solitude I had glimpsed in rare moments throughout my life, those brief pauses between obligations when I might read undisturbed or walk without destination.
This was something else entirely: a quality of presence, of being genuinely with myself rather than merely by myself.
I had no words for this experience. During Covid, I learn to call this place alonetude.
For decades, psychological research has approached solitude primarily through a deficit lens, and rightly so. Social isolation carries mortality risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily. Loneliness predicts cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and depression. The public health imperative to address what former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness” has produced essential knowledge and helped countless people.
But this focus created a gap. By treating solitude primarily as the absence of connection, we overlooked solitude as presence: the presence of self, meaning, and restoration that becomes available when social demands recede.
Alonetude requires four elements working together like legs of a table:
Intentional choice: Solitude must be chosen, not imposed. Research shows that autonomous motivation predicts positive outcomes regardless of introversion.
Felt safety: The nervous system must register safety. You cannot think your way into alonetude while your body scans for threat.
Present-moment awareness: Not rumination or distraction, but genuine presence—what emerges when attention settles.
Meaning integration: Connection to values, purpose, or something larger than the passing moment.
Remove any one element, and the table collapses. Strength in one cannot compensate for the absence of another. This is the threshold model at the heart of the framework.
The Sea of Cortez doesn’t care whether humans theorize about solitude. The pelicans dive and surface following rhythms older than language. The mountains turn rose and gold at sunset regardless of who watches. But for those willing to participate, genuinely, patiently, with bodies regulated and hearts open, something becomes available. Not escape from life, but presence to it. Not the absence of others, but the presence of self.
Not loneliness and not mere solitude, but something for which I needed a new word.
That word is alonetude. I offer it now as an invitation.
Author: amytucker
Weytk.
I am Amy Tucker, an educator whose life has been shaped by questions of belonging, precarity, and the institutions that hold us or let us fall.
I was the first person in my family to attend university. By the time I was twenty-five, I was a single mother of three, working at a donut shop, taking courses part-time when I could afford them, learning what it means to calculate whether you can afford both groceries and textbooks. Those years taught me things about resilience and systemic exclusion that no textbook could convey. They also taught me that the academy is simultaneously a site of possibility and a space where people like me were never quite expected to arrive.
For twenty-five years, I have worked in education, including eighteen years at Thompson Rivers University on the unceded territory of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl'ecw. Seventeen of those years have been as a contract faculty member, teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, strategic leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation, and human resources. I also serve as Prior Learning Assessment Advisor, guiding learners to recognise and document the knowledge they carry from lived experience. My pedagogy draws from trauma-informed education, Indigenous methodologies, and humanities theory, approaching each subject as a human question shaped by power, meaning, and the knowledge systems we choose to honour.
I am currently completing my Doctor of Social Sciences at Royal Roads University, with defence expected in early Winter 2026. My dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, employs participatory visual methodology to document how international business students experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging. The research integrates sociology, leadership, communication, ethics, and higher education studies, grounded in what I call asymmetrical precarity: a recognition that precarities can rhyme without being identical, enabling solidarity without appropriation.
I serve as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, advocating for sessional and contract educators whose resilience too often subsidises institutional failures they never created. This work is inseparable from my scholarship: both are forms of witnessing, naming, and refusing to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.
My research interests include academic precarity, equity and inclusion in post-secondary institutions, labour in higher education, community-based and participatory methodologies, trauma-informed pedagogy, AI ethics, and leadership in crisis. I seek an interdisciplinary postdoctoral position, doctoral fellowship, or qualitative research project to continue this work.
Beyond academia, I am a monthly columnist for The Kamloops Chronicle and a regular book reviewer for The British Columbia Review. I represent Team Canada in age-group triathlon and am a long-distance open-water swimmer, finding in endurance sport the same lessons I find in scholarship: that meaningful work requires patience, that discomfort is often the pathway to transformation, and that we are capable of more than we imagine when we refuse to quit.
I carry within me threads of French ancestry reaching back to Acadian territory, a distant Mi'kmaq connection I hold with curiosity and respect rather than claim, and an Austrian grandfather who crossed an ocean knowing that belonging must be made rather than assumed. These inheritances shape how I understand identity, territory, and the ethics of conducting research and teaching on Indigenous lands.
I believe the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. I believe research should serve transformation. And I believe that belonging, when it comes, is made rather than given.
Kukwstsétsemc.
View all posts by amytucker