The Alone Together Holiday
Say we each mix our own little cocktail of work and play. And ask ourselves: what is work? And what is play?
Last spring, I went on a few dates with someone who kept trying to figure out how many hours a week I worked. He had recently switched careers and was trying to work less. My sense was he wanted a passionate, driven woman who knew how to chill.
I couldn’t decide, even in the privacy of my head, if this was me. Many freelancers I know echo this feeling. We oscillate between believing we are barely working and we are working way, way too much. This happens when jobs leak into our homes and onto our social apps, but it also happens when we get paid for things we enjoy, or when getting paid feels precarious and fleeting, sometimes all at once. On days where I don’t have evening obligations, I sometimes work “late,” until 9 or so. But recently, when a friend with an office 9-to-5 told me this made her feel guilty about her own refusal to work after dinner, I blushed, quick to tabulate the time that day I’d spent cooking and eating ratatouille (1.25 hrs), walking from one neighborhood fruit tree to another while on the phone (1.75 hrs), going to therapy (1.5 hrs), the grocery store (0.5 hrs) and trying to troubleshoot my washing-machine (0.75 hrs).
“What if you had to average your work hours in the week?” said the man who did not want to date a woman who would ignore him for her work.
I think I said something like “normal amount” and then clarified that I felt very lucky to do a job I loved, and it made me greedy. I wanted to read and write more. I also loved people, so I wanted to hang with them more, too. Because I rarely felt like I had time to keep myself fed and exercised while doing those things, I accepted that I was bad at other things— keeping up with TV, hobbies, my garden.
“Cool,” he said, valiantly. “So you’re happy with the balance?”
I wanted to tell him that the old adage, Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life, was bunk. That though nothing on this planet makes me as happy as writing “in the flow,” writing also often feels terrible, worthy of extreme measures to prevent (see 'fixing a washing machine' above). Many days I start with a to-do list, and then around 2pm, wobbly with the sense of having accomplished nothing, make a “to-done” list, tabulating emails I have responded to and freelancer invoices have submitted. Should I tell this stranger that after a day of random administrative work, sitting down after dinner to tinker with an editor's suggestions could feel like leisure? And same with the hour I spent reading the novel I loved that I was also blurbing—did that count in my 40 hours tally? Did all this work-y pleasure make me a workaholic? Did I want to be doing more or less of it?
It wasn’t until the man asked me about the last time I had a vacation, a real one, no laptop, that I realized I was struggling to articulate myself in part because I wanted to have it both ways. I love leaving my laptop at home, but I also really love going on vacation where I get to write. When I write on holiday, it might look and smell like the same thing I do on assignment at my desk, but it’s different. A stranger tabulating my ‘writing hours’ wouldn’t know this, but it is.
What is work? Doing a thing because you have to. What is vacation? Allowing yourself to do whatever you want, ignoring the shoulds, the emails, the texts. Living untethered from the clock. Eating treats. Pursuing novelty and pleasure. By this metric, an artist residency—time dedicated to creative pursuit—can also be a sort of vacation. Different than museum-hopping in a cool city or hiking into a mountain lake, sure, but a holiday all the same. I’m writing this from a hip, converted Greyhound bus near the Pacific Ocean, granted to me as the year’s Writer-in-Residence with the Astoria Writers Guild. I feel very fortunate. Some people would go crazy with a week spent alone in a rural place, but I love it. I love it so much I have spent the last few months honing how to combine this pleasure with the other thing I love: my family and friends. I’ll call this the Alone Together Holiday.
What differentiates an Alone Together Holiday? It is going with a person or people you love to a new place (it does not have to be far, I have done it while housesitting across the river from me in Portland) and then setting, with your companion/s, clear guidelines for how to choreograph your collective time. My goal is always to oscillate between creative exploration and leisurely recreation. This planning talk might go something like: "We’ll rotate meal planning. We’lll talk over coffee then do a writing prompt. We’ll write for a few hours, gossip over lunch, write for a few more, then go for a hike and find some water to lie in. Before dinner, we’ll mix cocktails and read from our work. After dinner, we’ll watch Mystic Pizza. We all pledge to swivel between ruthlessly, diligently ignoring one another and being dizzyingly present in one another’s creative lives.”
This is, technically, “parallel play,” a term coined to describe children playing separately in proximity to one another. But, as Sophie Vershbow writes in the NYT, the idea is applicable to adult relationships too. I suppose you could call this “coworking,” but I think it’s important to differentiate between work we do in service of a goal vs. “work” we do out of play, despite the fact that nobody is waiting for it and nothing might become of it. Vershbow quotes Dr. Amir Levine, a psychiatrist and co-author of Attached, saying that the key to parallel play is that you maintain availability while also holding boundaries: “If you know that the other person is available and that, if you need them, they will pay attention to you, then you feel secure.” It’s being alone without the social pressure to hang out, but also being able to ask for help because you know you’re not really alone.
In June, while housesitting for a writer-friend Josh on the Point Reyes Seashore, my writer-friend Thea came up for a 32-hour Alone Together Holiday. In July, my sister and I planned one in an apartment near a hot springs after seeing family in Montana. In August, writer-friends Tove and Devon and I drove to Washington then hunkered down at Devon's grandmother's old lake cabin. I’ve done Alone Together Holidays with boyfriends and friends who are not writers: the point is not that you are writing, per se, it’s that you are supporting each other on projects that are creative and experimental and, for whatever reason, hard to do at home.
Every morning over breakfast, my sister and I would pick a tarot card and, based on the image alone, write about it. Only later, after we’d written a few paragraphs and read them aloud, would we look up the card’s meaning. Every morning I struggled to launch into this prompt. My sister’s responses were so smart. What tack could I take? And yet, I’d hear her clacking away across the table, and, in some Pavlovian echo, I’d stop my stewing and figure out a way to type. And I’d always be grateful I did.
I recently learned about the idea of “body doubling,” popularized as an approach for people with ADHD, which states we are better at accomplishing less-desirable things when there is somebody else doing the same thing beside us. An Alone Together Holiday means body doubling both labor and pleasure. I write harder, I laugh harder, I do not worry about clocking work vs. play. I have time to be an introvert and time to be an extrovert and time to cook for people and time to read all morning.
During my last Alone Together Holiday of the summer, we had one perfect day of sun. After a few hours of writing, Tove and Devon and I went into the lake. Eventually Tove started swimming, slow and steady, farther than anyone else had gone. I’m going to the buoy, she said, and eventually, without really discussing it, Devon and I swam that way too. We got to the buoy, we hung on it, we laughed, and then Tove pointed to another. I want to see that one too. And so we went, slower this time, stopping to bob and chat. I share this because, had I been alone, I would not have chosen to get to the first or the second buoy. But I was not, and I did, and I was glad.
When we reached the buoy, an orange yolk atop the lake, we caught our breath and marveled at its slime. And then, alone and together in the water, we kicked back to the beach.
A note of tremendous thank you to subscribers for subsidizing this newsletter for everyone else: you make it possible. If you found this essay meaningful in some way, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone else who might, too.
Have you taken an Alone Together Holiday? What has worked for you to balance creative and social time? How do you draw lines between work and play? I’d love to hear from you.
A few other updates:
Podcasts: I’ve loved conversations on a few recent podcasts about Wolfish. With
, we talked about fear, how stories make the world, and the importance of play. On the Chills at Will podcast, about Sylvia Plath’s journals and diaries vs. letter-writing. On the Creative Process podcast, “what wolves can teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection.”Teaching: Spots are still open in the VIRTUAL ‘Writing About Animals’ class I’m teaching with Literary Arts on Oct 31 and Nov 1. There’s also financial aid, which is so vital and rare in these spaces. Portlanders: there are also spots in my in-person Braided Essay Weekend Intensive at the Attic Institute, December 9 and 10. Questions? Reach out!
Events: Details on my website, but this fall I have a few readings in Oregon—and a really exciting panel at the Portland Book Festival, details TBA—and am also heading to New York, Vermont, and North Carolina. Also, this Thursday, I’ll be talking with the brilliant
for her True Stories book club. It’s a virtual talk, available to subscribers of her wonderful newsletter. Lastly: I’m currently booking campus and bookstore events for the spring, and for my paperback tour. Ideas? I’d love to hear from you.
That’s all for today. Happy Libra season to all who love to paddle about the waters of beauty and indecision.
xxE
This piece reminded me of what Brendan Gill said to me once. He wrote for the New Yorker for 60 years as well as more than a dozen books. We became acquaintances working in the same office (not the NYer) because I was the only person who could fix his Mac computer. :)
Brendan said about writing, "Two good hours a day. That's all you need. Two good hours."
He also wrote only single drafts. (I sob a little thinking about that. Could never be me. Lol.)
Easier said than done. Especially when you don't have a steady job that is almost a sinecure, come from wealth, and live in the knowledge that your writing will be edited by a slew of world-class editors. And, are not juggling a gaggle of freelance assignments with deadlines looming.
Just something to think about on the days when you wonder how much is enough.
I just read Wolfish! It was fantastic. I have dog-eared so many pages. Thank you!