Jessai Flores

Become a hermit — a plan akin to Henry David Thoreau’s hermetic years by Walden Pond — used to hold a prominent place on my list of resolutions, but after a year-long attempt, it had to go.

It’s not like I disagree entirely with Thoreau’s reclusion. There’ll always be something valuable to be gained from hermetic retreat — hence the uptick in ayahuasca retreats and tentative relatability of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” — but I’ve been there and done that. 

I was freshly 17 and stupid and best friends with a girl in the grade above me who wanted to be the main character from “Girl, Interrupted.” Over long hours in her Urban Outfitters- and Brandy Melville-inspired bedroom spent breathing in her pineapple-flavored secondhand smoke — that, despite the chemical stench of tropical fruit, still smelled like weed — she convinced me that I was messed up, too. “It could be bipolar, it could be borderline personality,” she murmured, trying not to hack up a lung from the disposable she’d just purchased from a plug named Rudy. I didn’t really believe her, not completely, but I knew I had problems and was looking for answers. Our friendship predictably imploded when I realized that even wanting to be like a young Susanna Kaysen was a warning sign. I was left thinking it was time for my year of rest and contemplation.

Junior year of high school, I retreated from public life. I canceled every plan, dodged every text, slept thirteen hours a day — record breaking numbers for this nocturnal animal — and existed entirely by myself. Sort of.

My parents and friends visited me in my “cabin by the woods”: a sparsely decorated but highly cluttered bedroom that smelled like perpetual cat vomit and the orange popsicle juice that stained my window blinds. Thoreau cheated his reclusion just like me; his mom brought him loaves of bread and cheese instead of Trader Joe’s samosas. In that time, holed up in my bedroom in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I did connect with nature. One night, when I left the backdoor open, a lizard skittered into the living room. I grabbed it through a paper towel and flung it out by the chlorinated pool. Just like Thoreau, I sat by my pseudo-pond — or rather, backyard pool — and watched the seasons change. In August, I’d plunge into the deep end after several heated rounds of Fortnite. In December, I’d kneel by the edge of the pool and push my head underwater for thirty seconds to feel the water at its coldest. In April, I’d wade into the shallow end, trying to convince myself it was warm enough to swim. In July, I ended my solitude with a birthday pool party, featuring a blended strawberry-mint-sprite-whatever-I-had-in-the-house combination. The next day, I woke up with a beverage dispenser clogged with strawberry pulp and a revelation. My year of solitude didn’t teach me jack shit.

Maybe it was because I spent that year eating Bristol Farms poke bowls while watching reruns of “The Witches of Eastwick” and playing The Sims 4, but I didn’t gain much from introspection in solitude. I ran through the same scattered thoughts on loop — I wobbled between memories of my friendship with the wannabe Susanna Kaysen, my relationships with elementary school friends and my reputation as a biter in preschool, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I wrote diary entries about biting and teething and lashing out like a toddler, hyper fixating on the made up parallels between my pubescent life and preschool. I tried to find some significance in the fact that unlike my brother — who coveted his binkie long past the appropriate age — I’d spat mine out before I could talk. I spent a long time thinking. And thinking. And thinking. The only material I had for my investigation was my own memories, stagnant and mossy and swarming with mosquitos. I was pretty sure I was doing something wrong.

In June of my junior year, I finally read “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” I’d read it at the request of a stranger who’d balked at my idea that it could be in any way relatable. It was only then that I realized, via the novel’s obnoxious, self-centered and brutally unlikeable protagonist, that a year of solitude was the most pointless endeavor someone could undertake. The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s NYT bestseller was pretentious, selfish and a burden on the few people who cared about her. She wouldn’t leave her own head, even for an instant, to think about someone or something outside of herself. Sure, her year of solitude consisted of bed-rotting in her Manhattan apartment rather than Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond, but to me, a year of introspection had been a waste of time.

I’d spent the last year stewing in myself. I magnified my habits — playing video games, watching movies and eating junk food — to the extreme. I existed only for myself, all in my own head. I didn’t stop to think — not even once — about how my year of solitude would affect the people around me. While I slipped quietly into my own filth and self-centered reflections, my friends were left thinking I’d vanished off the face of the earth. Instead of cleaning the orange popsicle juice stain that’d dried and stunk and seeped into the window blinds of my bedroom, I spent months contemplating it: Why hadn’t I cleaned it already? What was wrong with me? What did this sugary, orange laziness in me represent? I was too busy contemplating the meaning of my inaction to realize that the sticky residue had lured a fleet of ants into my bedroom, which made a daily march across my desk and into the bathroom I shared with my parents.

As much as I’d love to believe that everything to be known is contained up in my head in some weird form of platonic recollection, I don’t believe that’s true. We need the world around us. We need to be snapped out of our selfish stupor and forced to learn from our mistakes. At least I do. It’s so much easier in solitude to sit and watch the popsicle stain, contemplating why I won’t do something about it, rather than actually pulling out the bleach. I needed to be in the world, surrounded by other people, to learn. Sometimes you need someone else to follow the trail of ants back to your room-turned-cavern, spot the orange-flavored stain and tell you to clean it up.