The book of good Robyn

Learning to let myself and other people alone

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Right after I sent out the newsletter on Wednesday about the post I didn’t remember, I remembered. So here it is. The post that will break the internet. Prepare yourself.

I have two siblings, so I heard some version of ‘leave your sister/brother alone’ a lot when I was growing up. Just as often, I was saying some version myself, as in, “Leave me alone, [insert name of annoying sibling]” or “Mom, tell [annoying sibling] to leave me alone.” I wanted to be left alone a lot as a kid—to pretend I was in a Star Wars movie or to wander through the woods alone. I wanted to be left alone until I didn’t. Like most kids.

It was much harder to leave my older sister alone than it was my younger brother. I wanted to be my older sister. I wanted her friends. Her clothes. Her hair. Her popularity. Yes, sometimes, her boyfriends. My sister, in my mind, was everything I was not.

I couldn’t leave my sister alone at least partly because I couldn’t leave myself alone. I could only conceive of myself in reference to her.¹ Like so many younger siblings, I had to be different because I know I could never be her.

This, I realized recently, might be part of what the poet David Whyte meant when he said in a podcast that you have to leave yourself alone so you can leave everyone else alone. I heard this sentence and was so confused. I puzzled over it for days. What on earth did that mean? It was connected to solitude somehow, but how? How do you leave yourself alone? How do you leave other people alone?

Maybe because I grew up being compared to my sister a lot (by myself and others), I do a lot of comparison as an adult. Everyone does, I guess. I compare my parenting style to those of other people. I compare how people spend (or don’t spend) money. How they negotiate their job, their free time. Their lives.

On the surface, it looks like I come out on the winning end of these comparisons. Clearly, my attitude to money is better. Clearly, I’m better organized. More enlightened. Clearly, I’ve got it all figured out. It might be more accurate to call what I’m doing here judging rather than comparing.

Judging and coming out on top looks like winning, only, if that’s true, why am I spending so much time talking and thinking and obsessing about what other people are doing? That doesn’t sound like enlightenment. Why can’t I stay in my own lane? Live and let live? Why can’t I leave everyone else alone? Well, because I can’t leave myself alone.

As more than one therapist has pointed out, people are different from me. This is a good thing. My friends are different. My child. My partner. All different, thank the universe, because, let’s be honest—I am annoying. I am the very hardest person to be around. Me! Myself! As songwriter Jason Isbell says so well, “In a room/By myself/Looks like I’m here with the guy that I judge worse than anyone else.”

And right on cue, there’s the connection to solitude. If I cannot stand to be by myself, I probably can’t stand other people, either.

Which is all good and fine, but how do I learn to leave myself alone, then? How do I settle down into that necessary solitude? That is the question, isn’t it?

Is there some irony that the book of good Robyn is also a Slytherin notebook? Maybe. I’m going with it.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I started keeping a book (which means yet another notebook—BONUS!) in which I write down as many good things about myself as possible every day. Not the comparative things. Not the ways in which I’m better than anyone else. No winning or losing in this book. I write mostly small things. I meditated this morning. I was patient with a student. I had every intention of cleaning the bedroom because it would have made Jeff happy, but then the cat was on the bed and I couldn’t possibly vacuum, but I had the intention. I said thank you. I smiled at someone even though they didn’t smile back.

Maybe the book of good Robyn is working. Maybe I’m learning to leave myself alone a little bit more. Maybe. I know it’s a practice anyway, something I’ll have to keep working at, because all the important things are.

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Good writing news—my book all about sport and gender and race and colonialism and trans athletes—Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy—will be coming out in a paperback edition in the fall. I love this book, so I’m very excited.

Local folks, there are still spots left in my memoir and personal essays classes on May 2 and May 16. Get your tickets here.

I’m trying Essay Camp with the amazing

Summer Brennan

at her Substack,

A Writer's Notebook

It's a March write-along. Check it out.

Essay Camp Starts Monday!

1. My parents, teachers, relatives and everyone else in our small town did not help with this. They compared my sister and I to each other all the time, which isn’t unusual, but is a pretty crappy thing to do to children.