Loving Your Inner Hobbit

We all want to be daring and bold. Letting yourself be a stubborn hermit a lot of the time might bring you more adventures in the long run.

Quoi de plus (1973) by Dorothea Tanning

I never take time off from writing this column. Even back when I was writing Ask Polly for New York and The Awl, I never took a break. There are good reasons for this: I love writing this column. Even when I’m not in the mood, I love being forced to enter the compassionate zone that’s required to answer a letter.  I also want this column to be consistent and dependable. I don’t want to let long-term readers down. I need to believe that even when a column isn’t exceptional or doesn’t hit on every level, there’ll be something of value there, something worthwhile, something that brings a small spark to your day.

My commitment to Ask Polly is real and precious to me. But there’s something darker guiding my actions, too: I don’t believe that I really deserve to take a real break. What else explains taking no time before or after my double mastectomy in 2020? What else explains writing every  single week during our cross-country move in 2021? This compulsion springs mostly out of gratitude: I’m so thankful that I get to write this column for a living! But also I believe at a gut level that if I ever take this column for granted, it will disappear as punishment for not appreciating it.

The more passionate you are about something, the more contradictory, dark, primordial layers you might discover inside that passion!

Even when the layers of your passion are dark, that doesn’t mean that they’re all bad: My subconscious ideas about punishment might sound pretty twisted, but they’re closely tied to my strong feelings about responsibilities, commitments, hard work, and being aligned with my ideals. Ironically, these strong feelings also inform my emotional reactions to what I see as the sanctity and moralism of our culture at this moment. Although I rarely allow myself to slack off or make a big mess, I’m anxious to defend people whose perfectionist standards break apart out of the blue, resulting in behaviors that look messy and reckless from the outside, but remedy a lifetime of strict, unyielding self-abnegation.

The truth is, I think that most of us — even those of us who outwardly appear lazy or disorganized or prone to underachieving — hold ourselves to uncomfortably high standards. We’re plagued by guilt without consciously realizing it. We’re ashamed of our regular human urges. We feel like we’re letting ourselves down constantly, just by being human.

It’s funny that this is so often my message, but I’m still so bad at letting myself off the hook!

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Two weeks ago, I decided that I should take a break from work and buy a ticket to Switzerland. My husband was going to Lausanne for a work trip and staying in a hotel for a week. Why didn’t it even occur to me to go with him? I haven’t been to Europe in almost 20 years!

Once I discovered that I could get a ticket on his flight, sit with him, and cover some of the cost with credit card points, I was very excited. I was locked in. I had to go.

But then, the next morning after buying the ticket, I woke up and thought: “Is my passport even up to date?”

Something strange happened as I was looking for my passport. Some part of me was hoping that my passport was expired. If my passport wasn’t up to date, I’d be off the hook. I could cancel the ticket and stay at home!

Why would I feel that way? Because traveling means breaking out of my comfort zone. It means having to find someone to watch our younger daughter and someone to take care of our two dogs. It means thinking through what I’ll wear in a European city. It means taking an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic (choppy air, hurricanes forming, unknown disasters lurking!). It means spending unnecessarily at pricey Swiss restaurants. It means trying to speak French for the first time in decades. It means feeling unsophisticated and out of place.

It's not that I couldn’t recognize the endless advantages to seeing Switzerland for the first time. It’s just that I’m the kind of Hobbit who always loves an excuse to sit by the fire sipping my tea instead of worrying about exposing my hairy toes in a crowded café full of lithe, beautifully-dressed, French-speaking elves.

I am the exact sort of Hobbit that loves to be LET OFF THE HOOK. Let the dwarves and the kings and the princesses and the orcs have their adventures! I just want tasty snacks and good books and my cozy Hobbit hole!

I’ve been embarrassed by my stubborn Hobbit core for years. Ironically, it wasn’t until I accepted that I am a round little hairy stick-in-the-mud that I started to challenge myself – gently! – to consider possibilities that I used to avoid. It took breaking apart the shame and the high expectations I set for myself to see that I could do anything I wanted to do. Staying home? Perfectly fine. Traveling? Also fine. Instead of looking for the right answer all the time, I finally learned to ask myself: What sounds best to you? How will you remember this trip, this year, this time in your life? What will sound good later?

In some ways, my decision for us to move in with my mom also sprang forth from this new way of making choices. Instead of trying to make the most reasonable or the most impressive or the absolute RIGHT choice, I decided that living with my mom for a year while we fixed up our house sounded interesting and worthwhile. We would be forced into new shapes. We would be forced to grow. That might be fun or it might not be fun, but we’d definitely learn something from it.

Following your gut without shame is what I’m talking about here. Following your gut means that sometimes you do what you always do, and you don’t break out of your comfort zone, and that’s fine. You let yourself be who you are! I’m a person who hates taking a real break from work. I just don’t see why I can’t manage to write my column no matter what else is happening! I TRULY WANT to keep writing through the hectic and hard times!

But other times, following your gut means challenging yourself to try something new,  not because it will make you a better kind of a person, but because it might be interesting, it might be fun, and at the very least you’ll learn something new from it.

I think the real irony here is that the more you accept exactly who you are, the more room you have to grow into new shapes. The more you embrace your core self, hairy toes and all, the more freedom you have to discover new selves, bright and brilliant and strange and sometimes unnerving. But why not let yourself be big and odd and surprising, even when it gets a little messy? Why not enjoy exploring the infinite worlds inside you, and the infinite possibilities out in the world?

Anyway, I am not taking a break today! Maybe I’ll never take a break! But I am in Switzerland now, and it’s beyond interesting and strange and new to me. I hope you can find something interesting and strange and new to you today, just by embracing and loving the familiar, Hobbity core of who you are.

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