What a Solo Season Actually Feels Like

What followed was not a sabbatical. It was not a breakdown or a midlife crisis dressed up in a colorful summer dress. It was a solo season. And if I had to explain the difference to someone who has never had one, I would say this: a solo season is what happens when you listen to your inner whisper - not by abandoning your life, but by carving out one chapter that is written entirely by you.

My husband is in Sweden. My life there is intact, warm, and waiting. Our cabin in the arctic mountains. Our routines. Our son. The people we have built our life around. None of that disappeared when I bought a one-way ticket to Florence.

And when my husband visits, Florence does something I did not expect. It gently removes the everyday blur of a long shared life - not because the life is anything less than good, but because there is nothing here but the two of us and a city with very good ideas about how to spend an afternoon. Long marriages, it turns out, can still have new chapters. These visits are one of mine.

When the city is mine again, I wake to ancient bells. Sometimes I work from an old wooden desk under a sloping attic ceiling, 85 steps above the street. Sometimes I work from bed and sometimes from a café. I eat well. I think clearly. And I have, over five seasons now, built something that is entirely my own.

I walk ten kilometers after lunch on sunny days. Not only for exercise - for living. Through the narrow streets of the historic center, where the stone is worn smooth by centuries and the scent of bread and home-cooked meals comes through every open door. And then up - out of the city and into the surrounding hills, where cypress lanes climb through olive fields and the air changes and the whole of Florence appears below you, like something you invented in your dreams.

The light up there is the color of old gold. I stop for views I have seen a hundred times. I breathe in every corner of these walks - the scents, the art, the sudden glimpse of a courtyard or a fresco that someone loved many years before me. I fall into conversations, because dog owners everywhere in the world speak the same language. By the time I am back at my 85 steps, something in me has settled. I have not just been in Florence. I have fully lived it.

People ask me if it is lonely. Occasionally, yes - in the way that any quiet is lonely until you realize the quiet is the point. But mostly it is the opposite of lonely. It is the surprising realization that you are in very good company - your own.

The solo season is not for everyone. But I have come to believe it is for more women than know it yet. Women who are not unhappy, exactly, but who carry a quiet sense that something in their life has not yet been said. A chapter that keeps clearing its throat and waiting. And who sometimes carry a quiet guilt for wanting more.

If that sounds familiar - even a little - I would gently suggest that what you are feeling is not restlessness. It is readiness. And if you feel that guilt, it will fade - because it is simply the unfamiliar feeling of putting yourself first, perhaps for the first time in many years.

And it does not require Florence. It does not require Italy. It does not require a daughter with a spare room and a dog with strong opinions about carrots.

It just requires a yes.

If you are wondering what your own next chapter might look like, I have put together a free seven-day email series to help you find it. No hype, no rush - just one quiet letter a day, and a few small tools to help you hear yourself again. Seven Days to Find Your Next Chapter ››