1corinthian8.2-3

I love people. I’m a people-person, you could say. But I am also an introvert. Is that possible? I say yes because I don’t really believe in introverts or extroverts as personality types but more of leanings. I guess I would be an introverted extrovert, as I am, well, a people person, but I also love and long for time alone.

After the busy rush of summer, I find myself a tad burnt out. I can’t even recall in my mind where it all went. It’s hard to believe that we still went to work during the summer. Fall feels like the buckling down to get shit done. Play time’s over. Work-wise, that is. In the rest of my life, I am just longing for time alone and time in books and yarn and the bathtub.

Partly, I just want solitude—to be able to live without a stressful schedule, to not have to worry about plans with people. I want to seclude myself. I want to just spend some time with God, the way I used to, before God meant Jesus too. I used to go into the woods and read poetry and climb trees and write poems and smell the air and feel God, talk to him. I imagine being secluded like Annie Dillard in her little cabin along the Sound in The Writing Life. Just chopping wood. I love hauling firewood, not that I can chop it.

I like to think that this solitude would fix me. Like praying or talking to God would solve all of my problems, so I wouldn’t have to worry or wouldn’t have a bad temper or say so many awful things. But when we are alone for a while and go back into the world, do we remain “changed”? No. We go right back to they way we were, maybe even more irritated at how people can be, forgetting that we are just the same.

Like each morning, I get up and read and pray and usually feel quite content going into a new day. Then I get out of bed. I go to work, and my mouth betrays me. I ride the bus, and my head thinks poorly.

It’s like when I am around my family after a long absence. I think I have changed, but I will always be who they think I am, so they treat me so, and I act accordingly. They treat me like who I used to be, and I revert back to that because that is how I know to respond.

It’s so wrong and ugly, and it all just makes me more aware that I cannot change myself. We weren’t created to live alone and try to become perfect stones on an empty beach. We were created to live in community and be messy and be real.

Today I tried to cheat that. I got off the bus downtown and just walked amongst the crowd, pretending to be one of them, making pretend that I fit in, like I was known. When I got home, I dreaded the fun music shindig that we were hosting; I didn’t want to go; I wanted to be alone. But of course I went anyways and really did have fun and really did feel like I fit in, like I was known because I was around people whom I love. Life is not solitude, not even solitude with God because how can we love God if we do not love his people? Don’t you get to know an artist through her creations? A writer by her words?