I Thought I Needed Seven Days Alone. I was Asking the Wrong Question.
For months I had been counting down. Not the way you track a date on a calendar. The way you count down to your seventh birthday. I dreamed about it. I talked about it and made my mom friends jealous.
One week alone. No husband. No child. No one needing anything, asking anything, requiring anything of me for seven consecutive days.
I made plans. Big, glorious plans. I would sleep like the dead. Eat good simple food. Hit the gym hard. Write until my hand cramped. Blast music through the whole house and be loud and vivacious in it, for no one. I would be a productive machine, powered by nothing but my own will. Energized. Restored. Myself again.
I wanted it the way you want air when you’ve been underwater too long. Except I’d been underwater so long I’d started to think the water was just what breathing felt like now.
And then it arrived.
And it was awful.
. . .
The brain fog started the moment I stepped into the house after dropping my family at the airport. I’d sit down in front of my laptop and within ten minutes my hand would reach for my phone. Not for anything specific. Just reaching. A dopamine hit. Any dopamine hit. I’d catch myself, put it down, reprimand myself back to the screen. Then I’d get up to make tea. Then check something online. Then back to the laptop. Then the phone again.
Stop. You need to finish this essay. Just stop wasting time.
My brain heard me. It just didn’t care.
There was one thing I could drop immediately though. Maintenance. No cooking. No cleaning. I ordered food that first night, rinsed the same plate and used it again for days.
By 9 pm I was lying on the couch, shouting at the ceiling.
“What is wrong with me?”
My nervous system had crashed. Not the kind you push through. The kind where nothing you do reaches it anymore. I knew this. Hell, I wrote about it recently. And I still thought I could push through biology.
On top of it, I’d spent the last two and a half months restricting what I eat, so that night I said fuck it. If I couldn’t control what my brain or body would do, I could at least control what went into my mouth. Two Freezies, two mini pizzas, a Babybel, a drumstick, lined up on the coffee table like the only decision I still had left in me.
At some point I gave up and went to bed.
And then day two arrived.
. . .
I woke up different. Rested. My body and brain had gotten the day and a half they’d been demanding, and the fog was gone.
I happily chatted with my husband and daughter while cleaning and putting things away, no urgency to any of it. It just felt good to move around my space and take care of a few things for once.
Morning writing, then the gym. Music blasting. Windows down. I could breathe.
Another writing session. More movement. By the time evening rolled around, one more writing session, dinner, and the TV with the lights dimmed.
No guilt. No racing against the clock. No tallying up the day.
I felt like myself. Actually myself.
There she is.
. . .
By day three the loneliness that had been running quietly underneath everything, started getting louder. The house had no life in it. No movement, no noise, no one. Just me and four walls that were starting to feel like they were closing in.
The gym saved me. People. Movement. Life. Even if I didn’t know a single person in that room. The moment I came back — walls.
I kept it all at arm’s length for as long as I could. Refused to look at it. But it doesn’t disappear just because you stop looking. The ortho appointment, the grass cutting before my flight, the Amazon returns, the library books, the laundry, all of it patiently waiting.
By day six I was done. I never wanted to be home alone for a week again. Because the noise stopped. The demands eased. My nervous system finally came down from high alert, but coming down isn’t the same as resetting. Something was still missing.
. . .
Two weeks later I was driving through the Rocky Mountains in Banff, Alberta. My daughter asleep in the back seat, my husband beside me. We talked for three hours about nothing and everything. The version of us that existed before schedules and permission slips.
I was calm. Excited. Present.
The trip moved differently. My husband found restaurants, breakfast took care of itself, and I drove. The rest was just living.
We woke up before dawn to catch the sunrise at Lake Louise. Hiked until our legs burned. My daughter complained most of the way up. About 3/4 of a mile from the top, my knee started flaring up and I ran out of patience.
“You’re a tough kid! This is the time to prove that. Is this hike going to make you quit? Or are you going to show it who’s boss?”
She stopped complaining and we both pushed forward.
We went white water rafting the next day. When the river calmed between rapids, I caught myself thinking, well this is boring. My daughter leaned over and whispered, “I wish there were more waterfalls.”
Halfway through the trip she ran out of clean pants and I found myself washing a pair in the hotel sink before attacking them with a hair dryer.
None of it bothered me because none of it was maintenance.
And that’s when I finally understood.
. . .
I had spent months fantasizing about silence. Convinced that if everyone would just leave me alone for a week, I’d finally feel like myself again. It wasn’t the answer. At least not for me. What I needed wasn’t a break from my family. I needed a break from carrying all of it.
Which makes me wonder how many of us are walking around saying we need a break, without ever stopping to ask what, exactly, we need a break from.
Because those are very different questions.
Kate Szatmari is a celebrity photographer and writer exploring motherhood, the nervous system, and the slow work of reparenting yourself while raising a kid. A Hungarian immigrant based in the US, she writes through lived experience with a sharp eye for cultural patterns most of us were never given language for. She publishes on Substack at kateszatmari1.substack.com.
