Best Friends and Working From Home
After placing the last plate in the dishwasher yesterday, I poured in the detergent, set the dial, and burst in to tears. It was not the chemicals or the hormones. Okay, probably a little bit of the hormones. Okay, probably mostly the hormones. But it was also because it’s been almost a full year since I made the freelance switch, and I was ready to admit to the kitchen sink that I am, in fact, lonely.
Look, I don’t get lonely. I clutch jealously at control of my life and my time like the One Ring. Days and days will go by and I’ll happily not leave my office except to go to Mass, at which point I’ll pile my purse and jacket in the pew next to me and daaaaare you with my eyes to sit on the other side. And if you do plop yourself there, you keep your sticky paw to yourself. I will genially wish you peace from my five-foot bubble of personal space, my brother. And also with you.
Nonetheless, yesterday I realized that I cannot remember the last time I have been shopping with another woman, and surfaced in tears because of it.
“But,” said my husband as I wept on him over this, “you don’t like to shop. We couldn’t afford to shop even if you did.”
“I knoooooow.” I covered my face with my arm.
“Aren’t I your friend?”
“You don’t understand about shoes.”
I barely understand about shoes, owning four pairs plus slippers. That’s about 30 shoes short of the national average for an American woman of my years. But this wasn’t, of course, about slingbacks; it was the lack of an immediate feminine haven. I’ve just moved across five states and I’m out of the traditional office-based workforce. My tribe is scattered and driving a minivan to ballet practice. They will know what I mean if I hold a skirt aloft and say, “Is this green too… like, green?”
An aversion to socializing is the main reason why I chose to go it alone. Life is good here behind my little rolltop. Nobody hands me a nametag and herds me into a conference room for icebreaker games—quite possibly the greatest blessing of my life. There is, instead, glorious silence and the little light of my home refrigerator. But nobody silently sets a cup of coffee at my elbow in the middle of a tough article, either.
I have progressed from forging my way through tenuous breakroom conversations to dreadfully missing the days when my work friends and I sat on Friday nights and ate an entire pie and pointed our forks at the TV, criticizing other women’s hair and reassuring one another that there were two telephone calls in our futures: One from Him, whoever that was. And one from the Career Fairy, who would see to it that we were super-scuba marine biologists and health-insured famous writers, respectively. The tribe huddled close.
Through my writing, radio broadcasts, and book readings, I have met all sorts of wonderful people. They ask interesting questions. They are kind. They are also not people upon whom I can presume to call at seven-thirty in the evening begging immediate cookie assistance because my date is due in half an hour and I haven’t showered yet. They have babies, jobs, lives—a life upon which I am loathe to intrude.
Maybe this is why I’m never far from the keyboard these days, post after post, chapter after chapter. It’s not just the career I’m shoving uphill. In the absence of the narrow hallway where we used to flip breadsticks and each other across the scrubby carpet, my readers have become tribe.
You don’t pay as well. But you’re a whole lot more fun. Gather round the glowing monitor with me, silent tribe.
Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com