Lunch is the meal in the middle of the day. The meal that is often away from home. The meal that is often in the company of strangers (or at least people who don’t know you at all) The meal that, if taken from home, is cold, perhaps reheated. Or made somewhere else. That’s lunch.

At school, it was the period where I desperately tried to fit in. The times where I sat with other girls pretending to be interested in conversations about beauty maintenance and other girls. It was also the time where you were ostracized for eating alone.

By the time I got to college, I didn’t want to bother with eating with other people. It was such a burden. At the dining commons, I would eat in the smaller room. The room where other people never ate. So nobody ever saw me in the bigger room. For years though, afterwards, friends would always be shocked—”Why are you eating alone?” Because I just do. It was too much anxiety to eat with someone. To come up with conversation, even empty conversation, between bites, because silence was never okay.

Then I graduated. I don’t know what I did in graduate school, because I don’t quite remember any specifics except cooking chicken and potatoes at home and bringing it to the lab. How did I eat? Did I eat normally at all? Regardless, it was there that I learned to “never eat alone”. Because “you may be missing an opportunity to connect.”

I took the professional networking advice to heart and did not eat alone for many years. Especially lunch. This is the time that I was supposed to build up my network, get to know people, connect with them. Everybody eats. Everybody.

But in the last few years since I already have a steady professional network…now I want to retreat back to my college ways. I want to eat alone again. To eat messily. To have nobody see. To choose the food. I remember in recent research, I asked what lunch meant to the participants. One participant who worked in HR said that lunch was a break from work. She worked with people all day and that with lunch, this was the time when she could be alone, eat her lunch away from her desk. That’s me I think. It’s me to go away and recharge. To enjoy the lunch that I had a $5 coupon for at a place with a long line and at a place where my colleagues won’t come with me to be relax for that one sacred hour during the day.