I Leave Every Party At Nine

Five to nine, coat in her hand, and the small negotiation at the door.

You are not going already. Stay for one more. Somebody always says it and they always mean it warmly and she has about four responses she rotates.

She has stopped explaining. That happened around three years ago. There used to be a reason offered, something about an early start, and at some point she realized that the reason was itself a kind of apology and that she was tired of apologizing, so now she just says she is going to head off and does the hug and goes.

And in the car, most times, there is about ninety seconds of something she does not have a good name for. Relief, mixed with a low residue that has been getting stronger over the last year and which, if she is honest, is the beginning of a conclusion about herself.

The conclusion is: everybody else can do this and I cannot, and after forty two years that is probably not a preference, it is probably a deficiency, and I have been calling it a preference to be kind to myself.

You know that five to nine. Yours might be a different hour or a different room. Some ordinary human thing that other people find easy has become, quietly, a piece of evidence.

Name what the conclusion costs, before anything else

The leaving is not the cost. Let me be exact about that, because most writing on this gets it backward.

Leaving at nine costs her nothing. She goes home, she is glad, she sleeps.

What costs her is the conclusion, which has been assembling for about a year and which is now doing something in her that a hundred parties never did. She has begun to turn down invitations in advance, not because of the parties but because of the ninety seconds in the car, and that is a life getting smaller for a reason that has nothing to do with the actual limitation.

And it costs her the friends who have started, kindly, to stop asking, because a woman who says no four times is not asked a fifth, and none of them know why she said no.

You have been building a case against yourself out of an ordinary limit, and God has never once entered that case. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and it is His Spirit who takes frame off a page and puts it in a car at five past nine with a coat on the passenger seat. Frame is a word about how a person is built, and He has never once been disappointed by one.

You have made the Most High your habitation

There is one line built for a woman driving home at nine.

Because you have made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, your habitation.Psalm 91:9

Let the Holy Spirit slow you down over one word: habitation. Not shelter, which is where you go in an emergency; habitation, which is where you live. And the verse describes it as something already done: you have made. Past tense, completed, and the completing was hers rather than something she is waiting to qualify for.

Which is worth sitting with at five to nine, because what she is actually doing when she leaves is going home, and this verse says she has one, and it is not the flat, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes habitation something a woman can feel in a car rather than agree to in a sermon.

You have been going home rather than running away, and the home was made yours rather than earned by you. That is not a way of making leaving early into a spiritual practice. The written word puts the habitation in the past tense, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ninety seconds in the car into arrival rather than retreat.

And I want to be careful, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Nothing here tells you that being quiet is better, or deeper, or that the people who stay until one in the morning are missing something. They are not. And nothing here makes the leaving into your identity, because a woman whose whole self is not staying has let a party define her after all.

What this does not settle

It does not answer whether it is a preference or a limit. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has written a book about it, and it may be both and it may change.

What can change is that the question stops being a trial. At the moment every five to nine is a small hearing at which evidence is entered, and the hearing has been running for a year, and there is no verdict coming because there is no court.

You have a habitation that does not depend on how long you can stay anywhere, and it was already made yours. Psalm 91:9 puts the making in the past tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a written line into a floor under a woman putting her coat on.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the turning down of invitations has been spreading, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not weakness in somebody who leaves early. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.