Catharine and I regularly joke that we’re doing things backwards. Because I work remotely for a company in DC (and my family lives out there), I periodically fly east for a little over a week while she stays home. Because we both work from home, that means I spend nine days running around from meeting to dinner to hangout while she sits at home by herself, having her meetings and doing her work, but physically alone.

In the Myers-Briggs system, I am all I. She is all E. If you know anything about introversion/extroversion, you can see what a problem this is.

I come back happy to have seen all of my people but absolutely, completely fucking drained. I want to hole up in a dark cave and not speak another word for three straight weeks.

She, on the other hand, is desperate for human company. The words have kind of built up inside her and are bursting to get out.

We’ve found ways to not make this a complete disaster. She has coffee with people and has a friend or two over to take the edge off; I gird my loins and accept that there will still be some people time even though I really don’t want to have any. We make it work, although the first week back is usually a little rocky.

If only she were the one who traveled and I was the one who got to stay home, things would be kind of perfect. I’d get the week of beautiful solitude, after which I’d be all calm and filled up, and she’d come home from a trip physically exhausted but emotionally replete.

But since this isn’t how it is, and since we do both work from home, we had drifted into a pattern whereby we were home, together, basically 24/7 unless someone had a doctor’s appointment. And since Catharine only goes to doctor’s appointments by herself during my work hours, the only times I had when I was home alone were the (very) occasional weekend coffees or preaching dates.

A few weeks ago, I said to my therapist that I just want a fucking break. For better or worse, my brain is a sheepdog, and if I am not alone, some part of my brain is busy keep tracking of all of my sheep, which means I cannot fully relax. That’s true even apart from the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into (I once told my friend her 5yo had climbed onto the kitchen counter and was getting something out of a cabinet while we were in the living room — she looked at me like I was from Mars, but sure enough, there he was on the counter), but it’s made worse because of the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into. I’m also just energetically sensitive. If people are around, I’m picking up on their emotional states, which makes it really hard for me to get clarity on my own.

She pointed out that solitude isn’t exactly something unattainable and asked me if Catharine would be amenable. Once upon a time, she took my need for solitude personally, because it poked all of her abandonment buttons, but time and repetition and lots of conversation have convinced her that it’s nothing to do with her personally — it’s about me and my needs. So yes, she’s amenable. We’ve even talked about it before. We’re just really bad at consistent follow through. Or, at least, our life makes consistent follow through challenging.

So we talked about it again, and the deal is now that every weekend, I get a few hours home alone. Catharine either goes to church or a coffee shop or a workshop or wherever. I don’t care which day it is, and I don’t care where she goes. So far my alone time has coincided with migraine spikes, but everything has coincided with migraine spikes lately, so that’s not exactly noteworthy. We’re going to see if this is enough, or if we need to add a quarterly hotel staycation to the rotation.

For so long, everything was weighted to what she needed, because the consequences to her not getting what she needed were so much more immediate and obvious. We’re trying to course correct, because just because I’m not going to literally die or fall apart in the short term doesn’t mean my needs shouldn’t be an equal part of the picture. We’re getting better at it. But it’s still hard to rewrite the internal assumptions.