I like to think of it as solitary refinement 

Roughly once a year, I need to take time for a self-prescribed isolation. My friends and family often struggle to understand my enduring need for distinct, uninterrupted alone time. Which means that during these times I’m often hit with Christianese platitudes about community and connection, as if I don’t understand the need for those things, as if those things aren’t exactly what I’m chasing as I spend time connecting to myself, reacquainting my heart and soul to each other. 

Each time I take this space, there are less people to tell, and there is less resistance from the ones told, but I never make it out unscathed by projections of others fears ‘for me,’ and I especially never make it out completely alone. Throughout my life as I’ve taken these times of solitude, as I’ve prioritized visits to my own inner ‘Walden Pond’ I’ve been met with skepticism at best, and hostility at worst, but the one thing that I have rarely been met with when expressing this deep need of mine, is understanding. So I am grateful to say, that this time felt a bit different. I could feel the people in my life respecting my need, even if not quite understanding it.

In the past it would’ve been difficult for me to take this time without allowing other’s frustrations with it to taint my time ‘alone.’ I would feel forced to spend my first few days, or weeks breaking the arrows of their intentional ignorance and unintentional projections and patronization from my body; performing surgery to remove the sharpest points in their words from my tender flesh. Occasionally I would be dealing with a barbed arrow or six, all the while perplexed as to why my needs were so abrasive to so many, especially when it didn’t take anything away from them, except for something that was never theirs to begin with—my time, attention, and emotional energy. 

I spent years feeling ashamed of the problems I ‘caused’ by getting know myself, by taking time for myself and choosing to spend at least a few weeks of every year on me, and me alone. Each time, I grieved the hours and days lost in guilt and shame over something that truly feels like life or death to me. Something that in it’s absence I watch my soul shrivel in real time, something that unfailingly helps me to grasp reality like nothing else in this world can—something that I like to call solitary refinement. For just a moment, just a small series of moments all I want is to exist with all the pleasure and purpose of a wildflower, and no expectations to my name. I won’t ever for the life of me understand why that need has been so offensive to so many, always so threatening— especially to the people who give little in return. 

Of course I understand the various reasons of insecurity, loss, loneliness, and control. In fact, I believe I have an impressive grasp on human dysfunction. What I mean is, even at my most insecure, even at my most unsure of myself state, I knew I needed this, without a doubt in my mind. Even then I marveled at how anyone could genuinely and aggressively believe that their fears should have any bearing on my actions and personal choices, much less take precedence over them. That is why I allowed myself to get lost in so many thoughts about their reasons for why I shouldn’t, because to me, it was curiously selfish, which betrays an uncovered motive.

Whenever the majority agrees on something I believe it is for one of two reasons: a.) there’s something here, some wisdom I’ve yet to clue into, or b.) they are afraid of their own independence and find it easier to follow a group ideology, than to exercise their own independent critical thinking muscles. My going against the grain upsets them because it reminds them on some level of their chronic dependence on things outside themselves, and outside their control. If it is option a. then I have a personal responsibility to discern the wisdom within the ideology and then to parse out how it applies to me. If it is option b. then my personal responsibility here has ended before it began, and yours is just gearing up.

Fear is consistently highlighted as a big reason why others don’t want me to take this time. And this fear, in my experience is rarely centered on me, or my wellbeing as they tend to claim, but rather on their own shadows. When I stand firm in my conviction of needing periods of [relative] isolation from this society I was born into, it frightens those around me, those connected to me, for many reasons, but one stands out— I am breaking the status quo, unapologetically. Though I am not truly hurting anyone or anything during this time, perhaps I am reminding those around me of their own failures to take care of themselves in the same way, a way contrary to a late-stage Capitalist society predicated on GroupThink, instant gratification, and constant stimulation. 

In short, without trying I am shining a light on the many pin-pricked holes of “the Matrix” we’ve begun dissolving ourselves into. And this light burns like the shock of the curtains being ripped open too early on a Saturday morning, bludgeoning your sensitive retinas with the brightness of day [in my case, the noon day]. Even though the sun is a life sustaining element, in that brief moment it is the center of our hatred for the unfairness of its unwavering expression in our previously dark inner sanctum. In this way, I have often felt hated, shunned, or resented for my lack of remorse in opening my own blinds, those around me then being forced to adapt to themselves accordingly, to open their eyes to the light that their lives are not truly feeding them.

I am pleased to report that over the years this effect has not lessened, but I have shifted closer and closer towards my true desires, largely through these times of solitude, and as I shift so do the people in my life. Not to say that I change everyone I come into contact with— though in some small way, we all do—but instead that as I learn to be more firm in my convictions about how to take care of my own needs, the people who walk alongside me step away, or leave altogether, and each time different folks appear who are more aligned to my current life path than the last, and with each new era of friends and loves, I get closer to my center. 

It can be scary to lose friends and lovers over things that seem trivial to a soul that is not practiced in the art of taking care of her own basic needs. It can feel empty, lonely and hopeless to watch people leave your life for choosing yourself over them in such a necessary way. But this is a fact of life. Not everyone we encounter is meant to stay forever. Some people are just blips of insight and experience in our lives, shaping us in some small way, but ultimately not serving us in the pursuit of our highest good. The pain of this type of loss is very real, and very necessary, and it is also balanced out by the strength and depth of the relationships that stick.

With each new era the people who have stuck around the longest put a smidge more effort into understanding my need for diving inwards, and the people who can’t understand now remove themselves from the equation. And in this process of life and death of relationships, I grow closer to myself everyday, closer to my purpose of flowing freely like water on a mountainside. Moved by the land, by the wind, and by the elements and creatures that inhabit the earth, ebbing and waning with the seasons. With every step I am able to take towards myself I am able to let go a little more, and a little more of what is expected of me by others, and to settle in deeper, and deeper still to the telling directions of my pleasure, my desire, my contentment, regardless of who, or who is not still visiting my rocky banks at the end of winter.