When I was in my 20s and living with a friend, I’d leave cookies in our kitchen, and within a couple of days, the box was empty.

For the few years we lived together, I assumed my roommate was sharing in the consumption. It wasn’t until I moved into my own apartment and chronicled the expediency with which I devoured a box of cookies that I understood she had never placed her hand in my “cookie jar”.

Back then, I questioned her about my revelation, and she confirmed her distaste for cookies. Maybe I always knew this, but, for years, I validated my cookie binge by imagining she was helping me finish a box (or two).

This sweet epiphany shaped my perception of the world. Afterward, I told friends they had to spend time living on their own to figure out who was eating the metaphorical cookies in their lives.

Living on your own is an insightful look into who you really are. There’s nobody there for you to resent because they left dirty dishes in the sink or to blame for making you stay up too late binge-watching Columbo episodes from the ’70s.

Conversely, you can’t give someone credit for eating the snack food you unintentionally finished in a day or seriously believe the apartment is clean because you’re the tidy one. In short, it unmasks you.

For the first time in over 25 years, I’m living alone. This is both a luxury and a reckoning. When I was in my 30s, and my children were young, my husband passed away, and I was instantly tasked with balancing a chaotic life.

When you’re a working single mother, who is also the sole full-time parent in a household layered in a film of grief, you don’t have time to think about who is “eating the cookies”. You simply exist to satisfy any immediate task, whether it be work- or kid-related.

During those years, I envisioned a day when my children would be on their own, but it was a concept, like having a fast metabolism or retirement, that seemed either mythical or for much older people.

There was no........

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