this time alone

 

Though I’ve been gone from home for a week now, today was only my second day alone—as loving a good roadtrip runs in the family so my mom came along for the drive to New Mexico and stayed through Thanksgiving. That leaves me with at least a month ahead of time to myself—which is both exhilarating, given how much unwinding and reviving I need to do from my last few months (years?) at work, and a little intimidating. I am, after all, known for my chattiness; am I really going to survive not talking with anyone in person for so long?!

I do have my reasons for submitting myself to this possible torture. First off, my job is incredibly people-intensive, and because I take people-work pretty darn seriously, I put a lot of energy into it, which seems to drain me emotionally and sometimes leaves me not wanting to deal with people after work. Given what a people person I am at heart, I don’t like ever feeling that I don’t want to see people! So I’m hoping that this solitary time will get me feeling good and ready to spend lots of time with people when I get back. In addition, I wanted to spend significant time alone in a new place because the character in the novel/novella I’m working on does that, and I’ve been needing to find new content for some of the early chapters and figured what better way to dig it up than through direct experience?

Thankfully writing and editing can fill a lot of the day. So far, I’ve written blog posts and fiction daily—and today I’ve edited three graduate school personal statements for other people and applied to one dream job for myself. I’ve also read half a novel in the past 24 hours. All that productivity makes me feel ok about not having touched my other project for this time off, which is a memoir that I love the first chapter of but really need to figure out an approach to the rest of. But I’ve decided to be flexible about my writing goals. As long as I get a good amount of fiction-writing done, I’ll be happy. Because in addition to all the pages I’m filling, something else really good is happening, which is that I feel I’m coming back to life.

One of the main reasons I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this job that makes me so proud and so exhausted all at once is that it’s felt impossible to have an emotional life while holding it. Partly that’s because work that revolves around social need is emotional work; even though I don’t serve the youth directly, my staff do, and they bring their stresses and concerns to me to support; plus, trying to strategically tackle some of the major life challenges that so many of our youth face takes some serious compassion and drive. Expending so much emotional energy at work does make me feel a shortage of it in my personal life. More severely, though, I think the lack of an emotional life results from the long, chaotic hours—which leave me with less than enough energized free time with which to be with others. And then there’s the fact that I live 30 miles from most of my friends, and the few who do live nearby also work too much—and they all have husbands, which limits their free time to some extent. Which is all to say that during the week, I often spend my time outside of work alone.

I have never been someone who views being alone as being lonely. But the lack of emotional life has definitely made me know that I value having one. I feel so alive when I have people in my life to pamper. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am going to incorporate love into my daily life when I get back. No clear answers yet, but even after one week off I feel capable of it again, and I want it, so I need to work on it. What I probably don’t need to do is continue the pattern of the last two nights—which is watching cheesy romantic movies because in this house I have something that I haven’t had at home since high school—cable! Boy do I not need to get Mark Ruffalo and Justin Timberlake crushes going; not at all. Especially because not that long before I left I may have gotten a real-life crush started, and when you add that to all this time alone after three years of feeling emotionally out of the game, you can picture where this is going: single girl, alone in a house for a month, watching romantic movies every night: she’s going to come back to California believing that true love is right around the corner! And who knows if it will be. But at least I feel energized for it if it does turn up!

(Have I ever used so many exclamation points in a single blog post?!)