Early & Alone #24: Retreat
I’m writing this to you from a second-floor bedroom in Hull, Massachusetts, where I am currently listening to the rain on the gabled roof above my head, and my coffee is growing lukewarm. I am here at the Hemingway House, a house where writers can apply to go to work for an affordable rate, for the next week, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
We, my friends Lauren and Tara and I, arrived yesterday in the late afternoon. We marveled at the house, unpacked our cars, then immediately headed for Stop & Shop, where we stocked up on writing essentials such as hot chocolate with mini marshmallows, cheese, ice cream, and copious amounts of coffee. (Don’t worry--we got some fruits and veggies too.) Once back at the house, we switched on the fireplace (the house has two--one gas-powered and one wood-fueled), opened a bottle of wine, and dug into respective projects--Lauren cooking dinner, me reading about tarot, and Tara actually writing.
I often wonder what people think when I tell them I’m going away for a week to write. It helped when I said the house was on the beach, though a Massachusetts beach in the middle of November is only appealing to the morose and the fair-skinned (luckily, I am both). I suppose a week away from work, from laundry, from the commute, from whatever quotidian nightmares haunt your life, is an attractive notion to anyone--but then there’s the writing part. The writing part is both the best part and the worst part. It’s the reason I’m here, a priority in my life, but then again, if it was really such a priority, would I need to escape to a house on the beach an hour away to actually do it?
I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I did it last year, too, but in a kind of modified way, using it as motivation to try and write every day. I wrote a mishmash of writing prompts, journal entries, and TinyLetters, the total adding up to not even half of the 50,000 word goal, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I was writing, a little. This year, it’s going a little better, but I haven’t been writing daily, and my output when I do write is only about 1,000 words, when the daily target to hit the goal is 1,667. I’m hoping to make up some lost ground during my week here, but at the end of the day, it’s the act of writing itself that matters to me the most.
Sometimes it feels like writing is the only thing I’ve ever been halfway good at. Even as a kid, I never played sports, never took a dance class, had trouble depicting even a stick figure in art class, and failed to learn how to ride a bike. But I loved making up stories, and sometimes I even wrote them down. It never occurred to me that this was something I could DO until college, when I started writing obsessively as a coping mechanism during my year abroad, when I was isolated by anxiety and fear, and then realized I could actually take a creative writing class when I got back senior year.
So writing is something I can do, something that steadies me and gives me a voice, gives me an anchor to hold onto in the storm of an otherwise chaotic existence. But then...why do I run away from it so often? Why do I find myself scrolling through Twitter, sleeping in, working out, scrubbing the bathroom, cleaning out my closet--basically anything to avoid the act of writing? This is a common malady amongst writers (I know from all the Twitter scrolling) but it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.
Whew. So, anyway. Here I am. Though I’ve been on several weekend writing retreats with friends before, I’ve never gone away for a week with the sole purpose of writing. At first, the thought slightly terrified me. I warned my friends that I might have to go home early if I got too overwhelmed. But now that I’m here, the house quiet except for the sound of the rain, I’m starting to worry that a week isn’t enough time for all the writing I want to do. There is my NaNoWriMo project, submitting an essay that was shortlisted for a contest but didn’t win, revising another essay I’ve been working on for over a year (a sorry pattern), reading the five books I brought with me, and maybe even starting to work on building a website for myself.
And, in case you came here for dating news, since that’s what this newsletter is ostensibly about, I’m also retreating in that sense. I haven’t swiped or messaged in months now, since early September, and I am feeling really good about it. I was seeing someone for a little while, but that fizzled (....although, can something fizzle if there’s never really a spark?) and now I’m content with making space for my writing and the holidays and this transition to winter, my most hated season. I think this retreat, both in the dating and writing senses, is exactly what my soul needs right now.
What I’m Reading: As I mentioned above, I’ve actually brought a stack of books with me on this retreat, all for various reasons. Some I’ve read before and some I haven’t. Here’s what I brought:
The Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea
The Situation & The Story by Vivian Gornick
It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons Why You’re Single by Sara Eckel
The New New Journalism, edited by Robert Boynton
Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
What I’m Watching: I technically finished this up last week, but I was pretty obsessed with The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. So much so, in fact, that I binge-watched multiple episodes a night, resulting in me needing to actually sleep with a light on one of those nights. Whoops. I usually don’t do scary (see embarrassing confession above) but I found the family drama and the handling of time in this series very compelling.
What I’m Listening To: Honestly, a lot of Queen, since going to see Bohemian Rhapsody over the weekend. I didn’t love the movie, but it did remind me how much I love the music.
What I’m Wearing: I packed an entire suitcase full of nothing but cozy clothes for this retreat, including a new fuzzy item my roommate persuaded me to buy at Uniqlo. She is not wrong--it’s $30, comes in a variety of colors, and feels like a hug.
What I’m Eating: This is gonna sound weird, but I had cereal for breakfast this morning and what a treat! I normally don’t eat it because I don’t keep milk in the house since I don’t drink enough of it and it always goes bad. But since the three of us are sharing, there’s milk, and thus, I can eat my Vanilla Almond Special K in bliss.