Must Be the Season of the Hermit

Image by Sheree Brand Art Co.

When I was a child, my favorite tarot card was The Hermit. I thought a hermit was an individual who conjured magic and mystery, alone in his hut in the woods. Perhaps he dwelled in a cave, or an underground cavern, but he chose this life and it pleased him greatly. He might be gruff to visitors, at least initially, but ultimately he cherished his role of wisdom-giver, truth-teller, and sage.

The hermit was entirely self-sufficient. He needed nobody, but sometimes people needed him. He got to decide whether he helped them or not.

Print by The Ghoulish Garb

It never occurred to me that a hermit could be a woman, or a human of all genders or of no gender at all. A lot of things didn’t occur to me as a child, and while some folks feel their imagination shrink after childhood, I find that mine has expanded. My childhood was often too fearful to imagine all the places I’d go.

In tandem with my imagination, my practicality has expanded as well. The dreamscape and the waking life are playgrounds for both the fantastic and the mundane, though the imaginative surely has greater power when I am asleep.

In my sensitive childhood, I was unable to speak before a crowd without shaking. I did not often like being around crowds of people. I did not cherish the chance to go on adventures away from home. I nervously used the bathroom time and time again before an event or a trip, but I could not urinate away my fears.

There are and have been hermits in real life. They do not fit my childhood ideal of the magical being who somehow never needed anyone or anything. Of course hermits need help.

The writer and orator Henry David Thoreau is sometimes described as a hermit, and this is entirely incorrect. He socialized frequently with visitors to his cabin in the woods, which was on the property of his patron and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. He walked into town for supplies. He kept in touch with his family. He never pretended to be an ascetic.

I lived for a year in the high desert, in the shadow of beautiful mountains shaped like a church organ, and the people told stories about an ordained priest who chose to go up into those mountains and live in a cave, 150 years prior or so.

The dwellers in the colonizer town nearby watched for his firelight each night. Sometimes they brought him things. Sometimes he prayed for them. One day, the firelight wasn’t there. Upon further investigation, they found he had disappeared. Nobody knew where he'd gone.

I have been to his cave. I imagine sometimes folks try to stay there now and again, probably eventually politely asked by park rangers to move along.

I find myself in a curious season, not just because my first Chicago winter has been so odd - one weeklong deep freeze bookended by sunny days as balmy as 50 or 60 or 70 degrees; less ice on Lake Michigan than ever before; snow predicted for this afternoon; my own adjustment to this climate, in which I’ve determined that as long as it’s over 20 degrees, I may as well bundle up and take a walk.

I like it here. There is incessant construction on my building, and old tenants keep moving out, telling me that it’s been unending and they’re sick of the noise. Even now, I hear the whine of the angle grinder on the exterior. I’m sick of the noise, too, but I’m too tired to move again.

I was something of a hermit in New York City, but I am not a hermit here. I socialize now and then. I go out and explore things. But I’ve been bogged down with exhaustion lately.

Recently, I came to understand that weeks of intermittent intense back pain, headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, and depressed weeping did, in fact, amount to what people call “burnout.” I am fortunate to have a busy career, but it has not been easy to excel at work while managing a big move, dealing with family situations, and still trying to process a recent experience that required public vulnerability.

Sometimes I say that I am part Vulcan, because I don’t always understand the emotions that want to bubble up inside me. They first arise in the body, and I examine them with great curiosity: what is this agony in the neck? What is this churning in the stomach? What is this curious prickling at the back of my eyes? Are those…tears? But why?

I felt so off that I wondered if I had COVID (I did not). I took a couple of days off my busy full-time job last week, and another couple of days away from it this week. I iced my back a lot. I kept up with weekly therapy. I went for some walks. I stretched often. I used pricey-ass CBD cream. I took too much ibuprofen, and then my stomach felt weird so I stopped taking it. I visited the chiropractor a couple times. I got a deep tissue massage. I don’t love using precious vacation days to mostly just lay around and listen to audiobooks and stare into the distance, but I am grateful to be able to do so.

I listened to Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance for the third time, and began Devon Price’s Laziness is a Lie for the first time. I considered ways in which I might lighten my load temporarily - not permanently, and not rashly or drastically.

It occurred to me that I could actually take a brief sabbatical from the work I do here in this newsletter. I’ve seen folks like

Emma Gannon

and others do it, but it had truly never occurred to me that I could do the same, or to write to you honestly to tell you why.

And while it pains me to consider the loss of income that may result - a few paying patrons on Patreon already canceled subscriptions as soon as I announced this to them - I am taking a monthlong break from SARATONIN (this newsletter) and Patreon (where I share photos and more experimental creative writing) until April 20.

I can’t take a month off from my full-time job (for which I’ve already traveled twice this year, with another work trip coming up shortly). And I want to keep up my work for

Wonkette

, where you can find my silly quasi-political stories and weekly advice column.

But if I am going to get some rest, heal from this depressive episode and finally finish a revision on my hourlong TV dramedy pilot, something has got to give.

I am not becoming a hermit, not really. But I need time to complete that pilot revision and send it off. I need time to fill the well with art. I need time to learn. I’ve already done one workshop with my friend Carmen Maria Machado, and I’m excited to do another one! And I need time to sleep.

I feel I’ll be a better, more consistent writer when I come back here April 20.

I am already dreaming up things to create while I’m “away.” I like sending you chatty, conversational things, but I have some essays in mind that will take me into the creative sandbox in which I haven’t played so much in awhile.

If there are subjects you’d like me to tackle or questions of particular interest, please feel free to let me know in the comments. I would find that very exciting, actually.

If you have ever been able to take a sabbatical or a break from work and found it to be restorative, I would love to hear your advice in the comments, too.

I’ll still be at

Wonkette

and on Instagram, and perhaps even occasionally on Medium. And I’ll see you back here in (less than) a month.

Thank you for understanding, and for being such a kind group of readers. Of course as soon as I get ready to sign off, I have ideas for a million more things I want to write for you, but I am forcing myself to take this break.

Your non-hermit scrivener friend,

Sara

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