Switches · the 905, Toronto
A full year away from every part of this, and I came back smaller
Pinned as took_a_year_off
- Wants
- one quiet partnership with nothing social attached to it
- Rope so far
- Seventeen years, one complete year off, and a much shorter week.
- Around
- the 905, Toronto
I took a whole year off. Not a break from a person: a break from all of it, the evenings, the group chats, the messages, the entire apparatus. I had reached a point where I was tired before I arrived anywhere, and I could not tell whether I still liked any of this or had been doing it so long that stopping would have felt like a failure.
Forty three, out in the 905, seventeen years in with a hole in the middle. What the year off told me was that I missed exactly two things: one person, whom I still see, and the particular quiet of an evening where nothing is being performed for anybody. I did not miss being known, or having views about how things ought to be run, or any of the rest of it.
So I came back deliberately smaller. One evening a week. Two people I talk to. Nothing on a Saturday. I do not go to things any more and I have stopped feeling that I ought to, which took about six months of low grade guilt to get through.
What I want is a partner who wants that same shape. Somebody with a full life of their own, not looking to me for a social introduction, who would be perfectly content if the two of us were the entire extent of it. If your version of this needs a crowd around it, I would be a disappointment to you.