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solitude
I've mentioned Cary Tennis before. He's a psychiatrist (or maybe a clinical therapist, I can't remember at the moment) who has a column at Salon.com. He answers letters, and I've got more than one story idea from his column. [Edit: Joy has pointed out that Cary is neither a therapist nor a psychiatrist. He's a writer. More about him here.]
If you don't subscribe to Salon it may be hard to get to this particular letter , so the short version: A woman writes to ask about her need for solitude, and the fact that while she loves her husband and wants to be married, she feels a strong need to have her own, separate household.
This is part of Tennis's reply to her:
My job is to cultivate thoughts, to grow them from little niblets into fully developed structures. The thoughts take time to develop. They need to develop uninterrupted. They're delicate crystals built in the air, each part suspended by an act of consciousness; they're precarious, like data in RAM, if you will: A crash, or a power outage, or any interruption of the system that holds them in crystalline suspension, and the whole thing falls down and you have to start over.
So if there are people around it can be hard to do the job.
Not everyone is a writer by trade. But many people have the same problem: Identity, or consciousness, or well-being, can be a delicate crystalline structure as well; any interruption and the identity crashes. Consciousness becomes muddled. There are people who are not writers who nonetheless live in the imagination, whose identities and sense of the world are precarious structures. They read books and think about the ideas in the books. Or they wake up from a dream-filled sleep and want to think about the dreams, which hover on the edge of consciousness. So even having to say hello to another person in the morning can make the whole thing collapse.
This really is what it's like to write, for me. I live inside my head mostly, and have to force myself to go outside and interact with the real world. Intrusions are destructive. I can't have music on at home while I'm writing because it invades and distracts. Though for some reason I can go to Starbucks, where there is music and talk and noise, and completely retreat inside my head and stay there with no consciousness of what's going on around me.
Then again this may be nothing more than ego and self-aggrandising twaddle.
December 8, 2005 05:36 AM
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Comments
I get thrown off in the mornings if my husband turns on the news, or worse, Regis & Kelly. One word out of that woman's mouth ruins those moments for me. *g* I need absolute nothingness in the mornings. I can write in public with huge noise. Music, chatter, construction. But when I'm at home, I can't. I'll never understand myself!
Posted by: Alison at December 8, 2005 03:00 PM
Our office was recently renovated. The design was to be a mix of cubicle-land versus offices-with-doors. Of 15 people in my department, each manager would get a door, (for privacy) but it was nice to know that they never questioned the non-management writer/editor's request for a door. It seemed to be a given. Convincing them you needed a door did seem to rest on how much of your job was spent "in your head." It's an interesting dividing line in the workplace. But now that we're in the new space, it's clear it was the right way to go.
Posted by: Pam at December 11, 2005 03:17 PM
Cary's neither a psychiatrist or therapist. Just a writer.
Posted by: Joy at December 11, 2005 10:33 PM