“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” - Virginia Woolf
In my next life, I want to come back as a person who can concentrate with noise.
For years, I worked at a beautiful desk off the kitchen, but when COVID struck, it became impossible. Dishes clattering, doorbell ringing, toilet flushing, dog barking, phone conversations, other humans breathing nearby.
I discovered it’s not just about having a room of my own. I want two doors between me and the world.
Silence is a commodity, two doors a luxury. I get it.
But two doors insulate against intrusion. Turning one knob to ask a (non-urgent) question might happen reflexively, but turning two? There’s time to reconsider.
Two doors protect against sound. One door plus earplugs (or white noise - my fav is the 10 hours of Celestial White Noise on YouTube) can do the trick. But two doors make an anteroom, a place where sound is trapped and contained like the anteroom of a butterfly sanctuary.
Two doors create a sacred physical environment, the sense of passing from one realm to another even if that realm is really just a guest bedroom in the basement.
I have done this work for a long time without a dedicated space. Should I be able to concentrate anyway? I don’t know. We tell ourselves a lot of stories about willpower, that if we really want something that we should be able to do it regardless of the circumstances.
Maybe that’s true for some people, but it’s not true for me.
An example. I love junk food, and if there’s junk food in the house, I will eat it. And when I’m not eating it, I will think about eating it until I finally give in and eat it. I’ve tried all sorts of things to not eat the junk food, but the only way for me not to eat junk food is for me not to have it here. It’s simple. I have to set up my environment to encourage the behavior I want.
I know now that I think best with silence. That means setting up an environment that makes silence possible. I’m lucky. Soon, I will have an office. A built in desk in front of a window. Two doors.
But I also know I made a mistake all these years by dreaming of perfection and not creating a better, more appealing workspace. Even though two doors are ideal, there is something beyond the ideal. A table, a desk tucked away and saved for creative work. Maybe there’s just one door. Or none (but I hope not!).
We want our work to be sacred, so the place we do our work must be sacred too whether it’s behind two doors or not. But hopefully, some day, it will be.
Two doors
"other humans breathing nearby" *nods heavily in agreement*
And I have either EDM or white noise (this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c&t=6704s).
"We want our work to be sacred, so the place we do our work must be sacred too whether it’s behind two doors or not."
This hits home.