I am asking myself how time is an island
On being alone and being creative
There is a certain feral joy I feel when I choose to spend time by myself. It is the joy of making exactly what I want for dinner and eating it cross-legged in my pajamas with a book in one hand. It is also the feeling of finally being in my car by myself after a hard day at work, and crying and playing music so loud that my crying turns into yelling, then singing along, and I feel lighter afterward. Being by myself feels like a release. For the past 6 years or so, I’ve chosen to spend the day of my birthday completely alone, usually taking advantage of long summer days and finding a lake to swim in or a river to walk along. It’s become one of my favorite traditions — in the world of myself, my birthday is the most exalted holiday, and I celebrate accordingly.
I had the last week of 2025 off work, and ended up pet sitting at a little house in Shawnigan Lake, which is called Showe’luqun in the Hul’q’umi’num/Cowichan language, and is on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Quwʼutsun/Cowichan tribes. Leading up to my trip, I began cheekily referring to it as my “creative retreat”. I liked the idea of giving myself, who enjoys dabbling in a lot of different things but who shies away from ever referring to myself as a capital-A Artist, an opportunity to retreat and create. What a privilege it is to get time to ourselves, and time to make things for the sake of making alone. I committed to writing every day, working on some sewing projects, playing a little bit of music on my banjo, and journaling. I also committed to not holding myself to creating anything that I felt the need to share or complete. I wanted to create for the sake of it, and be alone for the delight in it.
Over the past few weeks, a question has been rattling around inside me: how is time an island? Maybe this is a question I read or heard somewhere, or maybe it just came from myself. The question kept dancing around as I drove north, kept circling me during the ferry ride toward the island I was to spend the week on. I decided to answer it each day of my retreat, in the way that felt true to me in that moment.
Saturday: How is time an island? I am all question and no answer.
Sunday: Time is an island because my body has been mine throughout all these years, and also many different bodies. Time is the water around these islands of my body changing. I am the water too. I am surrounding time and time and time, creating the illusion of disparate parts where really there is sand, and rock, and a continuous ocean floor.
Monday: Today, my answer is a memory of being a kid and freezing my body still in the middle of playing or doing other kid things. I remember thinking: this is the first and last time in all of history that things will be exactly as they are right now. My body crouched in this precise position. The plants growing through the cracks in the sidewalk at this precise stage of their growth. The breeze moving through my hair just so when my hair is this exact length. And in noticing the singularity of that moment, the moment was already over. I remember feeling sad and amazed by this as a kid. I would turn stopping and noticing unique moments into a game. My kid self recognizing that each moment we experience is an island of sorts.
Tuesday: Time is an island, and memory is the water. Memory in words, stones, nostalgia, lapping at the shores of a place. Changing the shapes of those shores gradually, as water tends to.
Wednesday: Time is an island in that I can experience both without really understanding either. Without necessarily needing to. Although, of course, that doesn’t stop me from trying.
Thursday: My time, and the time of this cat who is curled up on my lap as I write, and the time of the river that I visited yesterday, are all islands of experience. And as unknowable as we may be to one another, we all share the same water, and we all still experience the tides of things together somehow.
Lola loves being alone (and I love Lola)
The only conversation I had with another person over the week was a phone call on New Year’s Day with my dear friend Lola, whom I knew I had to interview about the art and joy of being alone. For as long as I’ve known Lola, I’ve admired how she manages to create her own universes when she spends time by herself. She’s inspired how I unabashedly seek time alone, and also helped me redefine what alone can mean.
Tell me about your relationship with being alone.
Oh, my God. Well, I feel like it’s just like, part of my personality. And I’ve definitely had conversations with other people where I’m like, ‘oh, spending time alone is the best thing ever. ’ And then I realize that’s not necessarily the same for everybody. For some people, it’s more challenging. As I grow older, the more I appreciate the moments that I have alone. I’m a Virgo sun and moon, and a Pisces rising. And I feel like that all really comes out in how I spend time by myself. The Virgo in me loves organizing stuff and creating records for myself. I’ll listen to a radio show a day, and I’ll write the title of the show and the date that I listen to it. I love getting to the end of a month and getting to look at all of these radio shows that I listen to or all of these movies that I watched. And then the Pisces part of me loves the time to write in my journal or work on collages. Lately, I’ve been trying to take the time to be creative for at least 10 minutes a day and see where it gets me. So now I have this notebook full of little collages. 10 minutes is hardly ever 10 minutes. Usually, it ends up being a couple of hours. But saying “I can do 10 minutes a day” makes it more digestible. Those are the times when I’m alone and doing something. But there are a lot of moments when I am alone, and I am honestly not doing anything at all, and I love that too.
You said to me once, “I feel the most myself when I’m alone”. I think about that a lot — does that still feel true to you?
1,000%. I think it has to do with the fact that I'm not performing for other people. Even though a lot of my friendships and my relationships are super genuine, and I do feel known on a deep level by the people in my life. But still, when I’m by myself, there's no compartmentalization. I think the beautiful thing about being around other people is that the chemistry with every single person in your life is going to be different. But being by yourself, you can be all of those versions of yourself that you are around other people, or you can be none of them.
I suffer from a lot of social anxiety, and it’s nice to just take that out of the equation when I’m alone. I don’t fall into the muscle memory of being apologetic. I don’t need to apologize for myself. I can’t offend myself or talk over myself or be too loud for myself, or be too quiet for myself.
What advice would you give to someone who’s looking to expand or strengthen how they spend time alone?
I think you should go into alone time as a date with yourself. Really thinking of yourself and your needs as you would the needs of somebody else. Like the way that you would maybe approach a friend date. I love the moments when I'm by myself, and I realize I cannot be inconvenienced by anybody else. It's recognizing that you're a body, too. And you can treat your body and your needs the same way that you would try to be considerate of somebody else's needs and wants, and desires.
Even if you're not necessarily by yourself, but you’re investing in yourself, I think that is related to the alone time of it all. I love the concept of parallel play, and I spend a lot of time doing that with my partner, Luis, and my sister. We can be in the same room and totally in our own worlds. We can accompany each other in that alone time. I definitely love my alone time, but I know for some other people, it’s a scary thing to be physically alone. Living in a city, I appreciate my alone time even in really crowded places, like during my commute on the train. I really love going places to do things by myself. On my last birthday, I went to breakfast by myself and read my book. And then I went to the park and a little cocktail bar by myself. I felt like I was gonna be so awkward for being that person at a cocktail bar, reading a book. But you know, I felt so chic. Why wouldn't you go to a cocktail bar by yourself and have this delicious little experience? Write in your journal, play your Nintendo Switch, take your laptop and watch a whole ass movie at the bar by yourself.
Final question — how is time an island?
I think that being in your body, in the present moment, your experience of time is so different than any record of that moment you may create. For example, reading something that you wrote in the past. As you were writing it, you were aware of your feelings and thoughts in that present moment, but what you choose to record can only capture so much. You make an island out of a palpable experience. Something you can go back and revisit.
Even if you’re not recording anything in writing or another form, even our memories are just fragments of what we actually experience. With the people I’ve talked to who fear spending time by themselves, I think part of it is a fear of losing their grasp on reality. I know for myself, my reality changes a lot when I’m by myself. And there’s so much that I don’t remember from that time I spent. There are days when I don’t do anything memorable, I just exist, and that’s ok. Other days, maybe I just write a single sentence. I wrote a sentence that I plucked out of the sea of my mind and decided to record. A little island, you know? We can create that out of our experiences.
Some Suggestions
some books I love about time and islands (and that are also set in the area I visited):
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Tauhou by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
Write back and let me know about how (if) you seek alone time. Also, please respond, how is time an island?