Solitude: round two

To be truthful: solitude is not always easy. It’s not as easy as I make it sound. Even as you crave it, even as it soothes a part of your soul, that part that’s ever inundated with demands and requests and the gentle, welcome pressure of family and friends, it still requires courage, and hardness. This is my truth: I am soft, and I need to grow a shell around me to withstand this. I need to harden up, each time and every time. Even as I choose it, again, I recoil from it, and question what it is that makes me crave it, and the hardness that it brings.

I don’t want to be hard. I am a soft-boiled egg with a brittle shell. I am convincing no one. And yet here I am, again, on the first of September, on the threshold of everything; again, an end and a beginning, just like every day but more markedly so today when I choose solitude, once again. With a twist in my gut and a catch in my breath – fear; loneliness – and my shell not yet formed, still not set into hardness.

Tomorrow, I’ll be OK. Hard enough for things to bounce off me, and courageous. Tomorrow, I will go around and make this empty house my home again, and I will breathe a sigh of relief that catches only a little on the way out.  I know how to do this, and I will do it for as long as I choose it; for as long as the reasons for choosing it make sense. Tomorrow I’ll be fine, and these words won’t sting as they do now, so they need to be written, recorded, today, when they do. These words are my truth, and they sting because they matter.

I love you all, and I miss you: everyone who’s been and gone in the last few months. Everyone I’ve greeted with kisses and hopes at the port, and everyone I’ve taken back there, with slower, heavier steps and lingering hugs, and waved away onto departing boats, smiling, courageous, with tears you never saw: it was never casual, when I walked away. The courage might be real, but my hardness is just a shell, and I am soft inside. Don’t be fooled, even as I choose solitude once again. You are the reason I can do this; you, and those ever-departing boats that will, one day, bring me back.

100 days on amazon!

Available now in paperback and on Kindle!

How far do you need to go to find yourself?

What do you have to give up?

Daphne didn't go very far. After too many years of living as a writer who didn't write, she gave up her life in London to spend 100 days of solitude on the remote Greek island of Sifnos, off season, and find out, once and for all, who she really was. Her challenge: to write every day.

One hundred days and one hundred entries later, her question had been answered in more ways than she could have imagined, and the things she'd given up never mattered in the first place. This book is her story, as personal as it is universal, of the most obvious and most fundamental quest of all: to be happy; to do what you love.

Part memoir, part fiction, part philosophy and part travel writing, 100 days of solitude is a collection of one hundred stories, all of them connected and each one self-contained. One hundred essays on choosing uncertainty over security, change over convenience, seeing things for what they truly are, and being surprised by yourself; on love, loss, death and donkeys; on reaching for your dreams, finding enlightenment on a rural road, peeing in public, and locking yourself out of the house; on dangerous herbs, friendly farmers, flying Bentleys and existential cats; and on what it feels like to live in a small, isolated island community through the autumn and winter, to live as a writer who actually writes, and to live as your true, authentic self, no matter who that turns out to be. And to write your own story, the way you want it told; to find your voice, and the courage to let it be heard.

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Please note that due to Kindle legal requirements, I've had to remove all entries past Day 11 from the blog. To carry on reading past Day 11, please consider buying the paperback edition, or the Kindle version (which also includes Bonus Days 101-104). Thank you!