I like being alone, something I already knew.
I can handle quiet time by myself just fine.
I cannot handle five days alone.
It wasn’t a matter of missing my husband, or my cat. My daughter has already away at college three falls in a row, so I’ve adjust to that loss long ago, sort of.
No, it was being absolutely on my own with no one around who knew me, loved, or at least understood me.
I’d isolated myself. I hadn’t intended to. Was I surprised? Absolutely, not. I struggle with trying new things.
I’d gone wanting to ask people questions. Interview people about the area I’m setting my story in, I wanted to put myself out there, but I didn’t. I was going to say can’t but that isn’t entirely true. Of course, I can.
We all can but when you have struggles with shyness, when the butterflies and flip flops in your gut keep you at bay, when your heart races so it feels like you’re going down that roller coaster of hell it gets really, hard. And very easy to not try at all.
I tried. The first two and a quarter days. It is important to be that precise, to get “points” towards trying.
In those two and a quarter days I managed to get lost, I don’t have GPS, feel out of control, and be scared. All feelings I’m familiar with, none of which I enjoy. Does anyone? Obviously, some people do or else roller coasters would not exist.
I didn’t go into the scary looking bait shop, but I sat in the parking lot across the street watching others go in.
I didn’t explore downtown Laconia, even though it was within walking distance, because my sense of direction stinks and I freaked out I wouldn’t find my way back to the Airbnb. Two times once in Concord and the other in Laconia I looped de looped around trying to find my destination feeling like a rat trapped in a box. Thankfully it hadn’t gotten dark out. You can’t even imagine how thankful of that I was.
All those experiences resulted in my spending the next two and three quarter days in isolation. Naturally that made things worse! I should have seen that coming but it wasn’t until end of the third day I felt myself falling into a weird depressive shell. Trying to wrap my head around what I could accomplish (writing for instance) even if I wasn’t brave enough to go back out and explore. Instead I did a lot of sorting. And thinking. And thinking about sorting, because as everyone knows thinking a lot about sorting is the same as sorting, only it’s not.
Getting a lot of nothing done. Five days to myself and less to show for it than one day at home at the table by the cozy kitchen window. What could be looked at as an almost complete bust felt like a learning experience. Not one I want to experience again but thankfully one I could recognize by the last evening. And ponder about during the four-hour drive home if it hadn’t been so foggy the first three hours of the journey that I defaulted to listening to a book on CD and praying I wasn’t going to hit a huge wild beast, another car, or fall off the side of a cliff.
I really had a hard time with the whole damned almost week long experience except for listening to Stephen Briggs read Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals (overall not by any means my favorite Discworld novel but listening to Mr. Briggs narration was pure joy). I learned my limitations. My weaknesses. My strengths, mostly the lack of them, and know that in the future I will not be doing this again. At least not alone or for such a long period of time. Unless something drastically changes. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine that happening. See, I spent a lot of 2016 traveling to author signings, a writers con, and book festival. Usually driving myself to places I’d never been. Generally going “outside my comfort zone” and yet by the end of the year feeling no more comfortable about doing those things than I had at the beginning. Almost as though I learned nothing but I did learn something. Those pat phrases people like to say that “practice makes perfect” or “if you do things repeatedly you’ll become comfortable doing them” (another way of saying practice makes perfect) are a pack of lies! I wish they were true but I don’t.
I will try new things. I will go on another writer’s retreat. I have one paid for and planned with a group of folks some of whom I know better than others. I’ll keep trying just as I keep plugging away at my writing. Only I cannot promise the results will always be what I hope them to be.