As an educator, my office used to be a classroom where I taught young adults. Our days were structured with clear goals, content to cover, and the flow of life in between. Over the years, as I transitioned from teaching English to Alternative education, I found the process became smoother.
After returning home, often completely drained from the day’s work, I would search for an activity to restore my vitality.
Hairstyling is completely optional on a writing retreat.
Baking/cooking, crafting, painting, sewing, reading, and writing have always been my creative outlets. These activities allow me to release the working part of my brain and embrace the more playful side.
Now, my career is to create. Every day, I manipulate, wordsmith, and design to bring in an income. There isn’t much monotony in my day.
As I write this, it is 4 a.m., and I am three hours from home on my self-designed writing retreat. I am trying to create a specific time to meet goals that feel different from my daily life.
It’s an interesting problem to have – too much creative time.
I am blissfully, yet unnervingly, backed into a corner called entrepreneurship, where my creativity pays the bills. It is my life’s most validating, empowering, freeing experience—yet I still am establishing my patterns.
Back to my writing retreat. I have been co-authoring a beautiful young adult novel for over eight months. It wants to get written. Completed.
I can’t say I am dragging my feet, even though its importance and gravity might catch my breath occasionally. But I can’t seem to “write” it until I am miles away from my home office, having multiple nights to call my own to focus.
I started escaping on a solo writing retreat in March 2022 when I was drafting my memoir, and I am convinced of their magic.
Sometimes, my brain starts to overthink that I “should” be writing on such an important project daily or that I “wish” I could focus differently. Then, I gently remind myself that my flexibility and freedom with this path bring me the most joy!
I am on a five-day writing retreat to craft the most important work of my lifetime. How can there be anything wrong with my process?
Items packed in my Toyota RAV4 for a Wilde Writing Retreat
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Technology
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Lap table and small blanket
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A favorite coffee mug
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Alter items such as crystals, photos, zebras, or sage
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Resources – books, notecards, post its, lots of colored pens
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Snacks: trail mix, donuts, meat & crackers, fruit, chips & salsa
All that matters at my writing retreat is that the energy is positive, the electricity is plentiful, and there is a coffee shop within reasonable driving distance.
I highly recommend running off by yourself. After years of trying to “belong” with people in situations that were anything but happy, I found myself when I learned to go off alone.
Whether by plane to a spa resort in Arizona, a wall tent in the woods of Spooner, Wisconsin, or an AirBnB pretty much anywhere there are humans—go be you. Find the quiet. Reflect. Create.
Happy creating, humans!
I am a writer, indie-publisher, blogger, artist, and trauma survivor. Visit HezzieMae.com for a sea change paradigm shift in author mentoring, publishing & living.
