Marla's Cabin

Marla’s personality, from the time she was a toddler, could best be described as an “I” on a Myer’s-Briggs personality test. She was undeniably an introvert, who often hid behind her older sister and refused to speak to adults she didn’t know. Whenever someone curiously queried about Marla’s unusual behavior, her mother exasperatedly muttered, with a dismissive wave of her hand, that Marla was shy.

Marla’s mother spoke to anyone. Actually, Marla’s mother spoke to everyone. She made new best friends in line at the pharmacy, in waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, and on the seat next to her on the bus. No one was a stranger to Marla’s mother. 

Over the years, every time her mother shared personal information with yet another stranger, Marla rolled her eyes and sighed. And Marla completely tuned out when her mother regaled the family at dinner with stories about some award that a librarian’s cousin’s daughter had just received for some amazing thing she had done at work. “Who cares??? And why do you even know this???” Marla silently fumed. 

Marla resented not only her mother’s odd obsession with the successes of people she didn’t even know, but also her dismissiveness, and her depiction of Marla as “shy,” simply for its lack of precision. Marla wasn’t shy. She was an introvert. And those are two wildly different things. Marla wasn’t fearful of other people. She simply found them exhausting to be around. To be fair, the genesis of her introversion might have been the net result of being forced into proximity with her stay-at-home mother, who lacked self-awareness that you can stop talking occasionally. And Marla’s older sister was an apple that hadn’t fallen far from that tree.

Just after her 21st birthday, Marla married the first man who proposed to her, viewing it as the most efficient form of liberation from her mother and sister since she couldn’t yet afford to live on her own. Unfortunately, upon becoming a newlywed, Marla realized she was still surrounded by people all day, every day – both at work and at home. But she soldiered on, finding peaceful moments that allowed her to think in her car while driving to and from work, and occasionally while showering unless her husband interrupted her train of thought by attempting to have a conversation with her over the sound of water pummeling her head. 

Eventually, Marla’s husband’s job required a cross-country move, so Marla finally had a viable excuse to quit her very taxing and far-too-people-y job. Also knowing her husband constantly watched TV shows about rustic log cabins and was completely enamored with the idea of one, Marla bombarded him with real estate ads for cabins within an hour’s commute from his new job. As per her plan, he fell in love with one and they closed escrow within weeks.

Marla was finally afforded complete seclusion in their cabin for at least ten hours a day. She was deep in the woods, surrounded only by uninhabited vacation homes. She blissfully took her golden retriever for long walks around the isolated mountain pass and commenced penning that novel she’d always had in her head but never seemed to find the time to write.

But Marla soon found her solitude was abruptly curtailed every night. As soon as she heard her husband’s tires crunching on the gravel driveway, she braced herself for him to burst through the door with his onslaught of complaints about how much he hated his boss and his new job. Or he’d blather on about his fantasy of retiring early and purchasing an RV to travel around the country. These were the sole narratives he dwelled on constantly, no matter how much Marla tried to guide their conversations to something even remotely more interesting. She felt like a broken record, asking him every night if it was so bad, then why he wasn’t looking for a new job. And she not-so-gently reminded him that they would just have blow-out fights in an RV, as they had always had on road trips when he drove too fast and refused to make the occasional pitstop she requested for a decent cup of coffee. Not only that, but they could also never afford the gigantic RV of his dreams that he constantly salivated over.

Marla’s husband was a dreamer who had gone and married a realist in Marla. He eventually became completely disillusioned with married life and his dream squasher and packed his bags and walked out the door to dream his dreams and complain about his job somewhere else, with someone else. Marla was unable to muster up any feelings of melancholy about her husband walking out on her, for it was the first time in her life she could breathe. At long last, she found serenity in her cabin high up on the side of the mountain.

During the summer months, Marla contentedly watched the stunning lightning bolts and pounding rain slamming against the windows during wild thunderstorms. In the winter, she cuddled up under blankets by a roaring fireplace and watched inches of snow pile up on the deck. There was no one there constantly demanding for her to drive down the narrow, curvy, and treacherous icy mountain roads to go to office parties, or out to dinner with his friends, or on forced all-day shopping expeditions at crowded shopping malls.

Marla pounded away on her keyboard, cranking out an entire draft of that book she'd filed away in her head for years, all while the wind howled and shook the cabin during particularly bad storms. Eventually, she secured an agent who sold her very first attempt at a novel to a publisher. 

When Marla’s agent mentioned she would have to go on tour to promote her book, her anxiety took hold remembering how exhausting humans are to be around. But she was so excited at the prospect of sharing her book, she shoved those thoughts deep into the back of her mind. Throughout the tour, whenever she felt her introverted nature creeping up on her, she reminded herself she had a daily escape hatch to the privacy of her solitary hotel room to recharge her battery, and at the end of her tour, she would settle back into the serenity of her cozy cabin. 

Marla surprised herself with how much she enjoyed reading passages from her book aloud to rooms so full they were standing room only. And she relished responding to the many questions from hopeful authors about her writing process and what it was like to be a published author. 

As the introvert she had always been, and always would be, she responded: “You just need to find your solitude. That’s when words find the freedom to leave your soul.”