A Room of One's Own, No Longer...

The Pandemic has robbed me of ‘a room of my own’, so to speak. It was a difficult enough thing to carve out in the beginning, so hard-won, as space for women’s art always is. Justifying an entire room for nothing but books, ideas, and writing can be difficult, not to mention hard to afford. I’ve struggled for years to create the space, and then to find the time, to really be able to write. For me, it’s very difficult to pull my creative mind space out of the layers of stress, anxiety, and the preoccupation with paying work, which suffocate my mind. It takes me days to unbury myself from these polluting influences, and to find my spark and my voice.

A year and a half ago, I bought a house with my husband, specifically for the extra, attic room, and I was finally able to create a library for myself, with a desk by the window. It’s truly magnificent, you should see it: two whole walls stuffed with books, a comfy red sofa, and you can see the mountains from the window. Sadly, that was December of 2019. Once quarantine hit, my beautiful new library became my husband’s new home office space. Even more tragically, I was finally gifted the time away from work I have craved so deeply for years, I was stuck at home for two months with no other pressing obligations, and suddenly I again had no space in which to write! Maddening!

I know everyone is struggling with these kinds of adjustments, and I have tried to be patient, but a year and a half has passed, and I’m no closer to reclaiming my space. We don’t have the room for two offices, or the money for a bigger house, we don’t even have a kitchen table. I’m exhausted from trying to make money at the same time as trying to make my writing into a career, and I feel like for every step forward, I take six steps back. Society has deemed the creation of art a hobby, the resulting product of which, they consume more fiercely than oxygen. So why does the creation of art always have to take a back seat to the creation of wealth? And before you tell me to grow up, I’d like to remind you that when everything in the world came to a grinding halt last year, and when you were sad, frustrated, desperate, cooped up, and afraid, you all turned to art. While work sustains us in a monetary way, art sustains us in every other one. We need to find better ways to value and compensate the time and space it takes to create the products of art we so greedily consume.

Every person in my life, including myself, wants me to write more. When I say that most days I feel like I have nothing left to give to my writing, they don’t understand. When I say that now, I feel like I have nowhere left for my writing, I’m sure it seems silly, but Virginia Woolf said that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Two years ago, I didn’t think there was any possible way I could feel more robbed of the conditions I need to write, and then the Pandemic stole the room of my own I had finally created. It leaves me wondering how many other women are experiencing the same unsolvable problem? Not only do most of us no longer have any space at home just for ourselves, or for our work, but many of us no longer have any space left for our art.

While I’m certain that many men are also feeling robbed of their freedom, I have to wonder whether they also feel robbed of their space to create, or indeed, their very ability? As Woolf wrote, quite poignantly, “the world does not say to her, as it says to him, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world says with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?”.