Time alone is a chance to relax – and reboot your creativity
As a writer, I spend much of my time alone, and yet I almost always want more. I’m fascinated by the relationship between solitude and loneliness, between the yearning to be alone and our deep desire not to feel isolated. A few months ago, I announced to my family – who, to be clear, I love very much – that I was taking myself away for a weekend, something I had not done for more than a decade. My need to be on my own had become too loud to ignore. As I sometimes manage to, I’d let work expand into all the nooks and crannies of my life. All I was doing was work-parent-work-parent – and on that hamster wheel, it’s easy to forget the restorative power of solitude, let alone work out how to achieve it.
And so I went away, to a little hotel, and it was glorious, like a long, slow exhale. A full 28 hours in which no one asked me anything, or needed anything; nobody else had opinions about anything I did, or when I did it. There was no one to please but me. (I didn’t take being able to do it lightly and, yes, it was expensive.) Outside the normal framework of my life, it felt like being in my 20s again, that decade when I had no idea what a luxury I had access to, when my weekends were often empty and the days stretched out in front of me, full of the freedom to do whatever I wanted. I was oblivious to the fact that my future self would look back at all those solitary Sunday afternoons lying on a sofa watching television, and envy her own past.
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