100 days of solitude: Day 1

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