I’m gonna have to shake off these island ways. I’m gonna have to shed this skin and put my layers back on. This behaviour, this version of me will not survive in London. I’ll have to revert back to another, one who doesn’t smile at strangers on the street. This behaviour will get me arrested in London, or stabbed.

I walked to the beach the other day. A long walk, just under an hour on the main road between the town and the port, that’s empty now again that it’s October. Through the mountains and the fields, along the valley of the still-dry stream, a walk lined with the sage bushes that I’ve watched turn silver grey and duller grey and brittle and summer-dusty, and then gradually greener, greener and succulent and abundant, their scent permeating my winter walks, and then again, slowly, draining of colour and wilting back into summer, over the five seasons that I’ve spent here. I walked to the beach: a long walk, my last.

Two cars stopped to offer me a lift on the way there. The bus swerved round a corner and tooted its horn to say hello; a taxi, too. The local madman zoomed past on his scooter, wearing a Captain’s hat and carrying a shepherd’s crook; he waved it in greeting, and I raised my hand in response. Just as the sea came into view, my friend Polyna drove by. I did a little dance for her, in the middle of the road, as she disappeared around the bend. She was probably laughing. This road, this walk, sometimes it’s like a party where you know everyone, and everyone’s happy to see you. At other times, it’s just me, and the mountains, and the sage, and the bay shimmering deep blue in the distance. When it’s quiet, when there are no cars coming from either direction, I sing out loud. You can hear a car coming a mile off: it’s that quiet.

Except for the music in my ears. I can’t hear the cars coming then. And a thought came, unbidden, as I walked: what it would feel like to be hit by a car. I felt the impact, as the car crashed into me from behind while I sang out loud, oblivious, with music in my ears; I saw my body thrown up in the air before slamming back down, broken and empty, half-on and half-off the road. I lived it, for a moment, my breaking, my death, and then I came back to life because I’m not ready. The pull of gravity is still too strong; I’m still tethered to this earth, and I have places to go. I stepped a little closer to the safety rail, with a backward glance for oncoming cars, and said thank you for my solid bones and the solid ground I walk on; thank you for the glimpse into non-being. Thank you, but I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready to leave this body or this life, but I’m ready, now, to leave this island. And I’m going to London. I’m going back home. I’ll just have to shed this skin, to leave these island ways behind. It is a death, of sorts.

This island. This place that smells of manure and chickpea stew and jasmine flowers, of sage and wood fires and the sea. Where crazy men set fields alight when the wind blows from a particular direction, where children and stooped old ladies and gnarly octogenarians on donkeys and labourers and girls in the latest Nike trainers stop you on the street to say hello, and where we all stop what we’re doing at dusk and turn our eyes west where the sky glows pink. This place that switches on you without any notice, that pounds on you with horizontal rain and scares you with thunder from your sleep and raises winds that carry your furniture away, and then sends the sun to cut through all your gloom and scents your skin with summer, no matter what the season. This place that tests you, relentlessly, and rewards you in ways you could not have imagined. This place that has been home for five seasons. How do I leave this place? How do I say goodbye? I don’t know how. But do we ever know how to leave?

It’s a human weakness, this desire for drama. It’s a human trait. My last, we say. And never. And goodbye. And we forget about the opposites, deliberately or by the accident of fear, the opposites that are contained within every concept, together making up the whole. We forget about first and always and hello; that there is always another season after a season. That the sage will wilt and bloom, just like our smiles. That leaving is just coming, in another direction.

I don’t listen to music when I walk the streets of London. I don’t sing out loud. I walk to destinations and the Thames never shimmers blue. You can buy sage in a shop but you’re not allowed to set things on fire. If there’s a party going on, none of us have been invited, and our smiles are as tight as the scarves around our necks. But England is an island, too, and some of my ways will carry over. And I will shed this skin, but I will grow another, and there is no amount of layers that can disguise who I am. It’s a human trait, this ability to adapt. It’s a human strength. We might forget, but it’s coded into our genes. So I’ll walk those streets in my London layers, but I’ll smile my island smile. Maybe, instead of getting me stabbed, it could loosen up a few smiles around me: that’ll be a first. Hello.

I don’t know how to leave, but it doesn’t matter: I’m not leaving. I’m coming home. I’m ready, now, to come home. It’s the opposite of death. It’s just life.

Today, I am alone. I woke up alone this morning. All the rooms that had recently contained sleeping people, people I had to be careful not to disturb, are empty; all the doors are open and the beds are untouched. I made coffee loudly and played music. I let the front door slam, carelessly, and no one protested. I am alone.

I will be alone for the next one hundred days. By choice.

Last May, I took my life apart in order to put it back together in a way that made more sense. I’ve always claimed to be a writer, and that’s been both my identity, and my – rather thinly woven – safety net, but I’d done no serious writing for years. I lived in London, surrounded by amazing people and doing a job I loved, but my life was like a beautiful, serene lake: deep enough and lovely to look at, but stagnant in places, and closed in. There was nowhere to go.

So I quit my job, left my flat, stored all my stuff in my friend Mel’s attic, and moved to Greece, to spend the next four months writing. The plan was to stay in my mum’s spare room in Athens for May and June, then our family house in Sifnos for July and August (rent-free places, with very few expenses), and then return to London in September, having established, once and for all, whether I was actually a writer, or whether I should stop clinging to that dream and move on to something else.

Four months on, I have proven conclusively, to myself and those unfortunate enough to have been around me during this journey of self-discovery, that I am indeed a writer, through and through. It has also come to my attention that I possess all the necessary personality traits to qualify as a reclusive author, many of which are shared with arseholes, and are nothing to be proud of. I have suffered through episodes that, to me, were alarmingly reminiscent of a mental breakdown but which my poet father diagnosed as “being inspired” and entailed, among other disturbing behaviours, scribbling away manically on any available piece of paper (I learned to carry a notebook with me, wherever I go), and biting the head off anyone who as much as glanced in my direction while I was writing.

These revelations are both a huge relief and a problem because, as uncomfortable and exhausting and costly as this journey has been so far, it is also, probably, the best thing I’ve ever done, and I just cannot go back to the life I had before.

So I’m not going back. I’m staying. I’m staying for as long as it takes, or as long as I can, or at least until the weather gets really bad; the locals that I consulted while trying to decide just how insane this plan might be all assured me that I can comfortably make it to December, provided I invest in an electric blanket. So that’s just over three and a half months; roughly one hundred days. One hundred days of solitude, and writing. One hundred days here, in Sifnos, a small and relatively remote Greek island in the West Cyclades, with a permanent population of 2,000. Plus one. And for the next one hundred days, I will attempt to live here, alone, in a summer house on the very edge of a tiny village, halfway up the island’s tallest mountain. I will attempt to stay warm and sane and cheerful as the days grow shorter and darker and one by one the last of the holidaymakers return to their real lives, brave as the noises outside my window grow stranger and more frightening, and determined as this ceases to be the latest crazy scheme Daphne has adopted and becomes, simply, what I’m doing. And no one but a few loyal friends pays me any attention anymore. And I will write. Because I figure, if there’s a place to be a reclusive author, it’s here. And if there is a time, it’s now.

And so it begins.

***

100 days of solitude: A personal journey that inadvertently became an alternative self-help guide to doing what you love and living as your true self – whoever that might turn out to be.

Available on Amazon. Read more > http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1849146608

As much as you can,

look around you.

As much as you can,

try to see.

If you can,

find the beauty and let it astound you.

Open your mind, set it free.

As much as you can,

trust the future.

As much as you can,

let it go.

If you can,

fill your days with moments, not worries.

Make your peace

with the things you don’t know.

As much as you can,

make a difference.

As much as you can,

lend a hand.

If you can,

touch someone that you think might need touching.

Don’t stand aside: make a stand.

And, as much as you can, understand.

As much as you can,

live your purpose.

As much as you can,

do what’s right.

If you can

put your love in whatever you do

there is never a reason to fight.

You will get all the things you invite

so, as much as you can, get it right.