Living Alone

also letters & technology

Buckle up, Team. This one’s a 3-parter.

I. Remembering

I turned 37 last week and marked my birthday by turning the cabin Ken built me into my full-time bedroom. I put a bed in the main space and turned the sleeping loft into a creative zone. It was a big leap from last month’s recognition that fourth places matter to I need a permanent fourth place yesterday. Enough, “later I’ll find the exact model that works for me. Later, when we don’t live here, I’ll be happier.” I need my own room, have always needed my own room, have known and said that for more than a decade. It’s what the cabin was always supposed to be.

Compromise is something I’m becoming more and more skeptical of. Aren’t most partnered people, and women especially, exhausted by continually “asking for more?” Even when we do sense the lives we imagine for ourselves on the horizon, we often can’t get to them because of all the necessary steps. This is where fatigue comes in, so many opportunities for feeling misunderstood, opportunities for one partner to feel like they’re getting the shit end of a deal. Shame and/or guilt about disproportionate privilege gnaw at us. We back off, don’t go there.

We have to go there. In general, if the ground isn’t shifting underneath me, a change isn’t big enough. Baby steps are not for me, drain me of what limited life force I possess. I love a good leap, covering ten steps in one. The risks are higher all around, but I find it’s always, always worth it. They don’t occur to me often, the leaps, but when they do I spring into action.

I fucking love sleeping alone. It allows me to truly release the day, to return to myself—as ritual. Moving to the cabin is about a commitment to self that’s nearly impossible to find when others are in the room. A daily reset space makes me infinitely more generous to everyone in my life. Logistically, there can and will be arrangement variations, exceptions and sleepovers, but what makes me excited to get up each day is the knowledge that the default is I sleep alone. I am fulfilling my dream of living alone without leaving my family.

I’ve taken a bit of perverse pleasure in telling people about the move. I watch the shift from pity for what is clearly a sign of an unravelling partnership to curiosity when I say I think I’ve found the way to integrate my lives as partner and mother and artist without abandoning anyone. I’m finding a way to not use all the energy I have on one tiny domestic bubble, am prioritizing the refuel in hopes of having more capacity for the rest of the world. At the very least, it makes me capable of focusing on actively loving a lot more people.

This is what the book I’m allegedly writing is all about, of course. All the stuff that isn’t the peoples’ fault, all the ways that we don’t think big because we’re ashamed we already have too much, and on and on. How to fit autonomy and family and transcendence and safety and sex together to form a life we really like living.

II. Letters

I would not be a writer now without letter-writing. I’ve talked about it before: early pandemic, permission to “do nothing,” time to write love letters. Letters are like journal entries that actually make sense. I write letters to figure myself out, choose the people I trust to witness that.

As my daughter gets older, I’ve become acutely aware that she’ll read my journals one day. Maybe in a few decades, after I’ve died, but probably in a few short years when she stumbles upon them and can’t resist. I’ve taken to inserting disclaimers, addressed to her, about what journals are and are not. They aren’t for anyone else. Sometimes they help us move beyond our most juvenile thoughts and behaviors. My journals are a blend of raw feelings, the sorting of truth, and a lot of bitchiness. There are pages all about parenting and mothering that could wreck her. They are about roles, not the unique being that is her, but that discernment seems like a big ask for a young person. I’ve totally read things in my mom’s journals, years after she died and decades after she’d written them, that hit me in the gut and left me thinking that my mom never even liked me.

Writing a letter does involve reflection. Most letters I send have been edited. I’ve worked out something I want to say, then rewritten the words to make sure I mean it. More than once, I’ve opened an email at home relaxing that I absolutely should have saved for a different moment. Letters are the most sacred form of communication we have: someone sits alone, gathering and refining ideas to send off to someone who will probably wait to read them until they are also alone, quiet, undistracted. Letters may be where I am at my truest, my most honest, both with myself and whomever I’m writing to.

At the Santa Fe retreat last month, I met Darcy. We ended up at a round table together toward the end of the first day, sat shouting over an empty chair, both immediately comfortable being our full selves. After maybe 20 minutes she said, “Oh my god, you’re my people!” I nodded, “I know.” Darcy runs a business called Hail the Snail Mail which champions the importance of letters and note-writing (buy pretty cards here).

“My people” is just another way of saying you reflect back things that are already in me. Lisa is my play muse because she helped me uncover impulses I already had. We all have social and creative and spiritual mirrors, each shining some fragment of the prism that is us back onto us. I’ve come face-to-face with all kinds of mirrors in the past few weeks.

Also in Santa Fe, I went to my friend Pam’s art show. As I absorbed her gorgeous work, she told me she’s committed to making one painting every day. That confidence and playfulness inspired me. Letters: I need to do that with letters.

Letters have been a huge part of my life, my identity. As a child I didn’t live with my mom, so there’s an archive of our written exchanges. When I first left San Francisco, letters were how I stayed linked to the people I’d left behind, how I processed that my mom was dying.

When she died, she left an organized storage unit of mostly things she knew I’d appreciate: art supplies and pillow cases and journals. And letters. The ones we’d exchanged, but also her correspondence with friends, my brother, other family members.

One thing I’ve learned from the stacks and stacks of Mom’s letters is the importance of keeping copies of sent letters. Because they’re carefully-crafted and intentional journal entries, they serve any writer who returns to them years later. If we’re lucky, and organization is a thing, it can even mean a whole chapter between two people in call and response. I might remember to make copies of my letters half of the time, so there are plenty of holes in my personal archive, but there is an archive.

I have a lot of people I want to write to now, hate that months and years have dragged by without getting to them. As I settle into a life that includes the daily return to self, I’m prioritizing letters as a (semi-) daily practice. I’m committing to those relationships, to a dormant part myself, to making writing fun. Letters are the ultimate play.

Also, who doesn’t love getting mail?

III. A Short Recap of My Attempts to Be Less Distracted by Technology.

• At the writer’s retreat, in the middle of a session about distraction, I ordered a Light Phone. I’d flirted with the idea a bunch, had a friend with one. I’m better at seeing what my daily life needs when outside of my daily life, so there was no hesitation.

• I got home. My friend explained some of the logistics to me: to prevent messages from getting lost in the ether, you have to disable iMessage from all your other devices. That’s a step I could take, but swapping out a SIM card and enabling/disabling iMessage sounds like a logistical headache for someone who wants to come and go a lot and who isn’t exactly fluent in technology.

• Talking to Ken helped me see I absolutely still want an iPhone for “the real world,” that I’m not ready to fully commit to the Light Phone in all corners of my life. What I actually want is a device just for music. Music is the only thing I need in a truly focused writing space. No WiFi, just music that’s compatible with bluetooth.

• Ken ordered me an iPod nano. The cutest. Buuuut when I plugged it into the computer, it told me it couldn’t copy the music because the music couldn’t be copied (going to use this logic more).

• I learned you can’t return an opened Light Phone.

• Currently, the iPod is still plugged into the computer, as if leaving it there long enough can will old technology to be viable in 2023. Maybe there’s still hope? If you understand these things, please help.

A couple questions that have come out of this saga:

1. When do the logistics of resisting the newest, easiest and most distracting technology take up just as much brain space as that thing we’re trying to avoid?

2. At what point does eliminating distraction lead to total isolation?

stamps are also art

Your Optional Assignment, also a 3-parter (choose one or do them all):

1. Bypass a series of small steps you want to take toward a life change and just leap.

2. Write a letter to someone you think about often. Don’t let time deter you, it can be a postcard.

3. Come up with an actionable plan to be less distracted by/addicted to technology.