Last month, I had the sublime experience of joining Cat Rambo’s Wayward Wormhole novel workshop. A dozen-odd of us converged on a ranch in deep southwest New Mexico to review the first fifty pages of everyone’s work, with full-manuscript critiques from three instructors.

Critique is deeply necessary and also always stressful, even when it’s positive. We all talked about this: how did your critique day go? Oh, it was great, but I’m also super jangly inside right now, even though I got what I wanted. For some of us, this pronouncement was made or greeted with a very necessary glass of wine. Alas, no matter how conscientious the moderators are (and they were), no matter how carefully shared the structure is (and it was), no matter how much you asked for it (and we did), being judged is hard.

This is true even for two-hour Zoom workshop-style classes from the safety of your couch, and an onsite event like this has all that and more. In a shared house with shared bedrooms, where do you go to cry, hide, or avoid being perceived? The desert surrounded us, but as it was amply staffed by scorpions and other pointy, beautiful wildlife, it wasn’t a place I found restorative. Beautiful and interesting, yes, but I need four walls, a locked door, and quiet to wind down from things. I quickly came to adore my cohort, but anyone I’ve loved can tell you that I love best when I don’t have to see or hear you constantly. How can you get the benefits of an intense, immersive experience without causing the mercury in your introvert overload meter to explode out the top? I asked this question a lot across my Wormhole days, and I found a pretty good balance. Maybe it’ll help you too. 

Here’s what I learned and what I hope to carry to the next workshop like this I get to attend (and I assure you, I would and will do this again).

1. Arrive with a strong sense of what you need to be okay in crowded environments. For instance, I need quiet, but I also need to not be observed. In my experience, this is a bit out of the ordinary, even among fellow hard introverts. To recharge, I need time away from having to process speech and sound, but I also need opaque walls and a door that I can close and know won’t be opened. In my regular life, I get this by living alone. Unless I have a friend staying, no one else has keys to my home. I close the door, and it stays closed. This is a complicated set of conditions to replicate in group living, but it’s not impossible, and it’s easier if you know ahead of time what you need. It’s generally not okay to demand, but it’s definitely okay to ask.
2. Make sure sleep is covered. Do you need earplugs? White noise? Something under your knees, a particular blanket, the temperature just so? Keep a list of your essentials. Bring what you can, source the rest. Without sleep, everything will be so much harder.
3. Learn about the space before you arrive. There may be information online; these events often rent out facilities used for other things, including vacations, so there might be a photo gallery or details about bedrooms and common spaces. You can also ask the organizers, which can yield multiple benefits. The people who run events like this want to know what their attendees need, same as dietary restrictions or physical health concerns. Conferences often have quiet introvert rooms now, and they’re becoming more normal because attendees asked for them. If you ask the organizers, you might get a tip ahead of time about outdoor spaces or a space that can sometimes be reserved for your sole use.
4. Upon arriving, stake out the quiet places with guaranteed solitude. Where are doors that lock? What places are far away from where people gather? Do you just need to be alone, or do you need silence too? This is harder in a place where people are staying overnight, because all the available space is probably allocated to the business of living. People probably aren’t playing ping-pong in the rec room 24 hours a day, though, and most people go to bed sometime (even writers, allegedly). There are margins around other people’s schedules that can give you what you need. Get creative; the laundry room might be completely empty after 8 pm, or maybe pulling a coat on and hanging out on a cold nighttime patio can get you the space you need. You might get to stargaze too!
5. Figure out what parts of the event are most important to you and which aren’t so crucial. It’s understandably tempting to want to do everything all the time, due to investment of money and time and the spicy worry of good old FOMO. A couple days into the Wormhole, I realized I didn’t care enough about breakfast to get up an hour earlier for it. Sleeping later gave me a solo hour or two every night, which proved to be a critical part of being mentally rested enough to get the most out of the rest of the days. I am Garfield incarnate and have hated mornings since I was 12, so this was an easy call, even without the social balance it gave me. I love when someone makes breakfast for me, but it was easy to decline a nice egg dish if it meant I got to sleep later and get the solo time I needed in the deep, dark desert nights, surrounded by the quietest quiet I’ve had in years.
6. Tell people what you need. This includes roommates, people staying in close proximity, gregarious people with good intentions, and anyone else attending the event. Living together with strangers is a wild thing, especially once you’re well into adulthood. Everything’s better if you’re honest: I do better when I have the room to myself an hour a day and know no one will come in, for instance, or I am taking this walk to be alone with my thoughts, so I’d love to do something else with you later. We all arrive at these things primed to meet people (and if you’re not, you might do better with a different kind of event), but we all make better impressions when we show up having taken care of ourselves. Also, shout-out to my roommate, who was both fascinating and low-key, accomplishing the magical thing of sharing a room with me without contributing in any way to my introvert problems. Rosie is a multidisciplinary wizard.
7. Foster a culture of openness. If you know you’re prone to avoidable overwhelm, mention it up front, or say something before it becomes a problem. Not only does this tell people what’s going on with you, possibly before they know you well enough to read you, but it also makes it normal to mention that you need some time alone, that your energy is low, or that you’re currently feeling less than ecstatic to be there. Make room for yourself, and you make room for others too. Once I started saying something about my introvert overload, I got quiet confessions of the same problem from others, and it gave us very sweet moments to relate about something intrinsic and difficult. Sharing the hard stuff along with the fun stuff is a great way to cement friendships.
8. Play to your strengths. In-person events let you make connections in ways that even the most robustly online event can’t quite mimic. (It’s still worth trying to make online events have social parity, though, for the sake of so many kinds of accessibility and health needs.) This doesn’t mean that you can only connect with people by speaking in the same space, though. Figure out where people are talking online. Is there a group chat? If not, make one. A shared digital space that complements the in-person stuff makes organizing easier and gives you another way to get to know your fellow workshoppers. Some people are funnier or more open in text (we call some of those people “writers”). Get a second channel and open up more possibilities. 
9. Prioritize taking care of yourself, whatever that means. I traded a little sleep for some solitude that kept my brain working better than a solid nine with no solitude could have done. Make sure you eat enough and don’t neglect the things that keep your body and brain working in your regular life. I did ten minutes of yoga every night, and it kept me from feeling too achy in an unfamiliar bed. Read, take your vitamins, talk to your friends and family at home, and do whatever else lets you feel comfortable in your brain and body. In unfamiliar settings with a lot of stimuli, it can be easy to neglect this important structure, but they’re critical to maintain. Think of it as an investment in getting the most out of your event, if that helps you prioritize it. If you have reinforcing methods for these things in regular life (vitamin and medication jars in view on the kitchen counter, a regular time for exercise around meals or work, a daily phone or text check-in with someone you love), figure out a version of it that can follow you into this new place.
10. Be open. Our ordinary lives are hardened chrysalises that suit our normal activities: work and friends and raising kids and dealing with our environments. Parts of it need to come with you; parts can be left behind for a few days. Even if you know that you need ten hours of sleep with whooshing white noise and your special pillow and a mug of your favorite tea and no talking or screens for three hours before bed to get good rest at home, see where your usual structure can bend. Travel lets us try on other versions of ourselves. An onsite workshop is not normal travel, but I think being around other people taking the same solitary creative journey gives us more opportunities to figure out other potentially more joyful ways to be. If I’d stuck to my usual strict I must be alone hissssss way of being, I wouldn’t have gotten up to late-night typing with fellow writers around a kitchen table or discussed next novel ideas with new friends in a hot tub with a majestic backdrop of desert mountains. Keep what you must, and leave the rest open for improv. 

High-contact, immersive events are tough but can be super worth it. I spent the third full day there absolutely frazzled, just maxed out and wondering if I was going to make it, enough that friends who received my fraught texts wondered if I was okay. I was, though, once I figured out how to use my energy, find space alone, and work around the (very morning-tilting) schedule to get what I needed. I figured it out enough that, by the end, I was very sad to leave, the most summer camp experience I’ve had in several decades.

It’s a special thing to have more than a dozen adults, unrelated except for a common purpose, in one place for more than a day or two. I made friends faster than I’ve been able to in a long time, learned a ridiculous amount, and went home knowing where I want to take my book and how to get there. It was the warmest, most encouraging, and most specific creative experience. It was tough on me at times, but I got everything I wanted, along with things I didn’t dare to dream I’d get.

Which is to say that I’m writing this, as I do with so many pieces like it, for myself, because I’ll need this advice again in the future. And maybe I’ll see you there too.