Friday, June 26, 2009

Parting

Saying good-bye makes me nervous. Maybe it's because it's the last chance to have everything said, at least for a while.

Today was the last of my 5-day workshop at Meredith on writing fiction. I've spent 35 hours with this group of writers in the last week, and, inevitably, we talk about some fairly intimate stuff. Writing brings that sort of thing out.

So it feels strange to finish the last lunch and maybe not see some of them again at all. My impulse is to dodge good-bye, grab up my picnic-basket-briefcase and run.

Maybe somewhere there are workshops in saying goodbye. Perfectly reasonable that such a thing would exist. If we can take lessons in leadership and assertiveness and stopping smoking, surely it's possible.

Probably lesson number one is: pause and at least say something before running out the door. I'm happy to say I did boldly manage to do that much.

It's so hard to know what to do with emotion, at least for chatty introverts like me.



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