social anxiety at the reading retreat

You should probably go to one of these...

Last last weekend, I found myself wedged in the fourth row of a party bus heading to the Catskills. It was my very first “press trip;” I was one of a handful of writers/media/influencer-types riding along on a 15-person getaway hosted by the New York-based reading retreat series, Page Break, in partnership with The North Face.

For me, the incentive was quite base: I was dying to get out of town, and a weekend in Hensonville, New York, where I assumed I’d mostly be left to my own devices, seemed easy enough to navigate. It was finally MY turn, I decided, to be spirited away to a hotel full of blonde wood furniture and designer toiletries, where I could post coyly from my guestroom about the important, mysterious work that would require me to be there—i.e., to skim through some random assigned novel no one there would probably actually read.

But as soon as we landed at The Henson, our new home base, on Friday afternoon and were greeted by Mikey Friedman, the impressively charming founder of Page Break and our de facto camp counselor for the next few days, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. As Mikey’s carefully stapled welcome packet made apparent (or had I not skimmed all those emails from his team in order to, what, more closely online-shop for acceptably cosmopolitan weekender bags), I was in for a much more structured—which is to say, maybe, considered—experience than I’d bargained for.

The book that had been appointed for this retreat was Nini Berndt’s debut novel, There Are Reasons For This; the expectation was that we would get through the book together and then sit down with Nini for brunch on Sunday. And so, the meat of the weekend, it turned out, consisted of the group reading sessions, where attendees sat in a rough circle—first, on the Henson lawn, then later in the hotel “living room” as a fire crackled in the corner—and took turns reading one or two pages aloud. So like… school? I bristled a bit at this and laid down grudgingly on the grass, wondering if the other 20- and 30-something-year-olds (mostly women, and pleasantly diverse) in the group felt a bit infantilized by this twist in the itinerary, even as Mikey excitedly explained the social science of reading together (some of it gleaned, I noted amidst my bad attitude, from research conducted in British prisons). Still, after an hour or so of sunbathing and effectively being read to, I decided there were worse fates, especially once the chef-prepared meals (themed according to where we were in the novel) began rolling out.

Over the course of the weekend, I could feel myself not so much relaxing as I was possibly regressing into a kind of child-like state. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. On one hand, there was this pleasingly sedative effect of being so well-fed and assuredly led from one activity to another. Mikey and the North Face team had anticipated every possible need, as did the staff at the Henson, where we were the only guests for the weekend. During the drive up, a publicist even insisted on buying our snacks, so that we trooped behind her at the rest stop holding our desired packets of chips like baby ducklings, or surly teens on a mission trip. Friday night, there was a bonfire, kindled already by unseen hands, waiting for us after dinner. Saturday afternoon, a hike through the rain at Kaaterskill Falls led by an expert North Face trail runner; bottles of non-alcoholic wine were broken out halfway.

We didn’t even really have to dress ourselves; The North Face, of course, saw to it that we were well-outfitted for whatever elements that were to be encountered, leading me to realize that I actually quite possibly enjoyed hiking as an activity, so long as I was covered head-to-toe in proprietarily water-resistant performance-wear that someone else paid for. I even rediscovered my old grade school habit of skipping ahead while the “class” read out loud, then panicking when it neared my turn and I had to page back to the appropriate point. (But then on Saturday morning, I skipped a session to try out the Henson’s sauna, and had to do the opposite during the afternoon session and speed-read for my life). It was deeply pleasurable, as the organizer Mikey must have observed in experimenting with the near-dozen retreats he’s been putting on since 2024, to simply laze around for a few days straight, worrying only about the reading.

And, well, the social dynamics. That I think I couldn’t have prepared for, at least not as a 32-year-old who’s more or less allowed the rapid-friend-making machinery one hones at Girl Scout camp or the first week of college to go to waste for years. It seemed deeply unfair to me that a few people on the trip knew each other well, and seemed less bothered than everyone else so clearly thirsting for connection, which created a power hierarchy one would otherwise imagine impossible amongst a group of book nerds. It also seemed deeply unfair to me that a press trip “for work” (even though I had literally only wanted to go for the IG potential) would require such social gymnastics of me; why couldn’t I just enjoy this preciously curated time all for myself? On the phone to my boyfriend, I said that I didn’t know the weekend would require “so much,” as if being cocooned in a nice, branded bubble in the Catskills was a kind of unimaginable labor. I felt both embarrassed and ridiculous when he asked if I’d made any friends, and I was like uhhh not really, but everyone is so nice, so maybe I’m the problem?

It was true: all of the attendees were perfectly polite and kind and cheery, and it made me feel even worse that I hadn’t magically formed deep, life-long friendships with anyone within the allotted hours—or that I found myself staring off into space several times at dinner on Saturday, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the subtle, primal assertions of personality happening up and down the table that I could not navigate my place in. I wanted to get up and leave; I wanted to burrow into the snowy covers on the bed. I wanted people to talk to me without me having to talk to people. Such was the level of childish regression that this weekend provoked for me, and I saw all at once how an adulthood studiously spent trying to avoid being in this exact situation—by sitting off the side, or alone in my room—the better to observe, the better to navigate the melee of Other People, had so hilariously left me feeling this conflicted and terrified in the face of what was simply pure company.

It was painful, but survivable. And by the light of Sunday morning, as we sat around eating ramp frittata and discussing the book’s ending and considering, a tiny bit sadly, how few of us would ever see each again probably, my agony felt almost laughable. As it turned out, my desire to “get away” for a weekend only led me to confront how ambivalent I was about actually being alone. To read a book together with a bunch of strangers might feel and sound oxymoronic, but so is any private joy until you share it.