What is gained in being home
and why Emily Dickinson is a true anti-hero
As we reach a new wall in these months of pandemics, of 2020, of 2021, of the anxiety and frustration that feels incessant and about to drive us all insane, or maybe already has — I thought about the first few months of the pandemic. I wrote this in March of last year, and I was reminded on coming across it this morning that there are some things that I will remember with gratitude about this time. Not in the sense that anyone should feel anything but frustration and anxiety and craziness, or that we must make ourselves always see a positive — the constant admonishments telling us how we should live are everywhere, and I could scream at the amount of media with words that tell us how we “should” live. This was just a needed reminder for me, that there are things gained by being home, and that knowing more about the places that we live in can also tell us more about ourselves and what we need.
The first months of the pandemic had been a mix of anxiety and freedom. The kind of freedom that you feel when there are no expectations on your ability to move or be elsewhere. One frame in which to be — and whole worlds within that frame that are typically ignored and passed by in a whir of daily traffic, like the blurring of propeller blades preparing for flight.
I admit I am one of those who is not looking forward to any sense of whatever “normalcy” people think existed before the pandemic hit, of returning to the expectation of life beyond our own power. The power to refuse to open the door if it’s not the right time; the power to share each day with the family we’ve created; the power to govern and respond to our own needs, our own management of time. While I miss time with friends and look forward to a time we can host others in our home again, there is a freedom from work culture and social expectations that gives more room to breathe than any time I can remember before.
When the pandemic hit, I had left a job of five years two weeks before. The 20th-century patriarchal structure of the place had become too pronounced, belittling, and toxic, so much more so than I realized in the moment. For too long I accepted that it was the way organizations have to function, that work has certain frameworks that we accept as part of professional life. But the lack of care and concern I witnessed, the lack of empathy for the staff and contractors as people, was too jarring. And speaking about it and desiring change was apparently too threatening to the power structure. I mistakenly had thought that in a place focused on culture and art, there would be critical thinking about how we work and what we work on. But unfortunately, I was shown over and over that the reality and intentions of the leadership were quite the opposite (which I later found to be a recurring theme of the many such places). I was in denial for I’m sure a large part of it. When your dream job sours, it takes some time to realize and recognize that it has become a hell.
The first two weeks I spent at home were the most freeing I’ve spent in probably fifteen years or more. Despite the anxiety over how my family’s new and rather dramatic change in income would feel, I felt whole. Not having to be at another’s beck and call at the expense of my self and family, not having to absorb constant negativity, to be able to govern my own workday in concert with making decisions based on my own interests and those of whom I love and care about…it was freeing in a way that was almost unbelievable, of not realizing how hot the water temperature had been and what it had been doing to my body and soul.
I thought a lot of Emily Dickinson.
The patron saint of being home, of social distance. I began to obsessively read her work. I thought of the many poems, sewn together, the packets of brilliance that she knew she was creating as she shut the door to her room. But we know she didn’t shut the door to the world. Reclusiveness is not about shunning the world — as much as the world is offended at their refusal to visit or be a part of its madness. Recluse is a term that is bestowed on those who are observed, thought to be passive and eccentric. It’s not typically a label that implies agency, choice — to spend time listening to the inner voice, the small frame, the one-inch world that speaks and opens an entire universe.
I had a writing teacher who would remind us that the work of a poet is a lonely life. All types of creation need that space. We do need Virginia Woolf’s room of our own, we need the space and the loneliness at times to understand the voice within, as well as the world without.
I began to think of Dickinson in her room, writing into the night, sending letters, and refusing to meet or be bothered by those she didn’t wish to see. The immense power and freedom she was able to create for herself, despite the proscribed limits and demands placed on the nineteenth-century woman. Dickinson chose to refuse marriage, motherhood, to create and work under her own name. To create and be a part of the relationships that were important and meaningful to her, rather than having to suffer the polite, shallow small talk of the crowd.
When I began to carve out a new life after leaving my job, I couldn’t believe how much I had forgotten what was important to myself over the past five years. I had become unfamiliar with who I was. I had fallen in line with the world that only ascribes worth through constant production, position, salary, networks. Writing is something that I’ve always loved to do, but I had not written hardly at all in five years. It was shocking to think of, really, when I was able to attend, write and complete an MFA while working full-time and having a three-year-old son at home years before. The reality of what the job had done to my psyche, and how it had demanded my whole self with no respect for my self, became very clear after I was able to sit still for a short time, uninterrupted. And within those first weeks, I could write. It was quiet. I could think and be — without judgment.
Adriana Cavarero writes, in her deconstruction of Plato and the Odyssey, that Penelope was not a passive figure — she was able to create and maintain a world at home. That it is the male hero who seeks adventure and story outside themselves in the external wilderness, to seek death and overcome it. Penelope, Cavarero writes, is not concerned with these ideals of heroism. Cavarero argues that Penelope illustrates how much we need a different understanding of the hero’s story that includes rootedness, place, and birth. Penelope, like Dickinson, was less concerned by what lies without, more interested in creating and examining what lies within. The view of the world beyond her border, beyond her window frame, was not something to conquer. By weaving and unweaving with her companions, Penelope controls her own fate, governs her time and people, and creates a world that is based in place, rootedness, birth, and creation.
Part of the discomfort with not having an external position now is that my life no longer fits into the patriarchal external world of constant growth, of quantity over quality, of moving to avoid stagnation or real thought. It made me realize with the clarity of experience how much we are forced to subscribe to frameworks of the male heroic ideal — to ignore place by always looking elsewhere for glory; to ignore a need for rest and dismiss as weak the need for quiet. Work culture forces us to compartmentalize our different needs, desires, questions, and emotions, and to label them a threat to professional success.
It’s so hard to not ask people what they do for work — we’re addicted entirely to the idea of producing. We grow confused if someone is unable to describe what they do in one word. What we do, we are told, defines us, sets us within the strata of society by which the external world can measure us. We are coached to always be taking the next step, even if the one you are on gives you joy. We’re told to always want more. And worse, we’re told to essentially feel shame for not producing, of needing time to reflect. Even now, I write sometimes because I feel like I need to produce to quiet the voice in my head that out of habit tells me I should always be working. The impulse and rote mechanics of it continue drumming inside our bodies.
But when I look at the window frame in front of me, I see trees that have grown crystal in the cold of an Alaskan February, the landscape turning bright and reflective with the stronger light that returns more each day, so welcome after months of long twilights. I know of the birds that come to feed at the house each day, so familiar that I can identify them as individuals, know the sounds of their calls, the shadow of their wings as they fly across the windows each day. To notice how many other species are around the house each day, unobserved by the times I was not home in daylight hours. How the house that we’ve bought and made a home of, with memories and care, actually smells and feels during the day — the quality of the light in the mornings and the lacings of the shadows as the horizon tilts the light towards spring. Of being able to have time to talk with my son in the morning and give him full attention, to be able to say goodnight in the evenings without having to return to a work email or text, to be able to take him places during the day and not worry about a boss believing I’m not working or committed enough by doing so. Of watching my dog as he gets up and moves to each slant of sunlight that crosses the floor on warm days, and where his favorite spots are. To follow lines of thought and attention naturally.
I know it’s an enormous privilege to be home, to be able to finally choose to walk away from the toxicity that so many experience in their work, to have a safe space attached to the word home. I wish ardently that this time can somehow become more than a collection of individual experiences, that it can lead all of us to value the capacity to sit still and notice and learn — to value the need for space, for time, and for self. To me, these small moments all feel so whole in a way they never could be before — it’s a word I keep returning to, unable to think of another way to characterize the rhythms of these days. It feels whole. Wholly ourselves, wholly part of the real world.
