Loitering

I want more space in my life to loiter, and to rediscover the joy of writing for pleasure.

The 7-Eleven just around the corner from my house in Denver has a no loitering sign.  

I get it. The employees at that 7-Eleven are dealing with a clientele that includes droves of teenagers, who come from the combined middle school/high school up the street to buy their Takis and energy drinks, and people who look like they’ve lived hard lives. I’ve seen many people passed out around the neighborhood - in alleys, parking lots, and storefronts. The 7-Eleven employees are probably too exhausted from enforcing the “no backpacks” and “only five teenagers at a time” rules to monitor would-be loiterers. The sign makes life easier for them, and I support that.

But the sign got me thinking about loitering, and the general idea of hanging around idly, without a purpose. It’s something I haven’t been doing enough of in recent years.

I am in my late 40s. I’m a full-time clinical psychologist, a mom of two kids, a wife, a podcast co-host, and a part-time writer with two books under my belt. I have a PhD from Harvard, high achieving/workaholic tendencies, and an old house that needs more attention than it gets. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many unread emails are in my inbox right now. In other words, I’m busy. Rest can feel like a luxury I can’t afford - and loitering has mostly gotten lost in the shuffle of adulthood.

Recently, though, I’ve been trying to get it back. Having been overworked and exhausted for years, I’ve been reprioritizing how I spend my time, to reclaim more of it for fun and rest. I want time to enjoy my life before it slips by too quickly in a frenzy of activity.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, I would get tired in the afternoons while walking from the Hale Science Building, in the northwest corner of campus, all the way across to my apartment a few blocks southeast of campus. On beautiful, sunny, Boulder afternoons I would sometimes stop to lie down in the shade and rest. Occasionally I would doze off and take a little nap. That young Debbie seems like a different person than me now, in my 40s, always hustling and grinding with too much to do. I want that person back - the me who loitered more and napped in the grass.

Space to Loiter

To me, loitering means something deeper than standing in front of a 7-Eleven, eating, drinking, or smoking whatever you just bought there. It means having space in our lives to linger, without doing much of anything. It means less doing and more just being.

Some of the best times in life are times spent being unproductive or inefficient, “wasting” time doing things that make no practical sense on the surface. Things like:

• Reading a long novel or book series that takes months to finish – not for a book club or to complete a reading goal, but just for the joy of being absorbed in the plot.

• Playing hooky from work or school.

• Pausing to watch a campfire, lightning storm, or snowstorm for a while.

• Skipping an overly structured morning routine to hit the snooze button a few times and linger in bed.

• Chatting with a comfortable friend for hours, staying longer than planned because neither of you are in a rush to leave.

• Browsing around a bookstore, flower shop, or art supply store for hours, without intending to buy anything.  

• Watching a Star Wars marathon all weekend.

• Signing up for a pottery or dance class - not to be good at it, but just to try something creative.

• Taking a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood to smell the lilacs on a spring day.

While mindlessly scrolling social media (aka “cyberloafing”) might seem like loitering because it’s unproductive, it has a different feel to it than hanging out in front of 7-Eleven. I’m not against it - it isn’t morally bad or shameful, and I do plenty of it myself – but it’s just not the same. The scrolling feels too fast-paced, too overstimulating, too much information overload, to be truly idle.

One of the things I missed most during the Covid shut down era was loitering at my kids’ school playgrounds after pickup, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes an hour or longer, while the kids played. Our ostensible purpose was to let the kids have some time to run around but, for me at least, it was a nice break from the hustle of the day, a time to sit on a bench in the fresh air and shoot the breeze with the other parents. As an adult with lots of responsibility, it’s one of the rare times in my regular workweek when I loiter in public on a regular basis. Even now, as the kids get older, sometimes my younger daughter wants to head straight home after school, but I encourage her to play with her friends a while, so I can have an excuse to stay.

Rediscovering the Joy of Writing for Fun

I used to write for fun. In college I took creative writing classes. I dabbled in poetry. I would carry notebooks with me, to capture ideas, observations, and interesting words to use later in my writing. I would sit in cafes or outdoors with notebooks, and just write for hours. It was lovely.

Years of academic writing nearly killed the joy of writing for me. In graduate school I learned APA-style formatting and academic writing. I toiled away on writing my dissertation. In the last few years I’ve written two books, complete with book contracts, citations of peer-reviewed journals, and a lot of stress. I’ve faced my self-critic and a few inner demons when I had an approaching deadline and couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. I’ve felt pressure to promote my books with online content creation - Instagram posts, humble bragging on LinkedIn, and trying to understand the algorithms so my posts will be seen. It’s gotten exhausting.

I’m tired of writing for work. And, slight detour that might sound strange coming from a therapist who has written two self-help books, but I’m tired of self-help content. I don’t want more life hacks, or influencers giving me advice about how I should live, be more productive, or take better care of myself. I don’t want to see any more of that than I already do, and I don’t want to write it either! (For now at least - and if that’s what you’re looking for, you can check out my books, ACT for Burnout and ACT Daily Journal, my podcast, the blog on my professional website, or my Instagram page.)

Instead, I just want places to go (online, out in public, and at home) to loiter. I want to write just for fun again, like I did in all those notebooks in cafes in my 20s.

I want this, my new Substack newsletter, to be one of those places – for me and for you. I want to loiter here by writing about whatever inspires me, whenever I feel like it – no deadlines, and no APA-style formatting necessary. I want to write for fun, with no real goal and for no practical reason.

I hope you enjoy it here too - A Place To Loiter. Welcome!

I’m a clinical psychologist, co-host of Psychologists Off the Clock, and author of the books ACT for Burnout and ACT Daily Journal. You can find me online at drdebbiesorensen.com.