Creating Headspace: What Does it Take?
A shower and an apartment of my own are privileges I never thought to leverage and also revise, but this is indeed something I have done in order to be able to think and create despite distractions.
It hit me just now why I come up with so many ideas in the shower. I have often padded through the apartment to a notebook or computer screen, leaving wet tracks throughout the house, and air drying, leaving an imprint of my butt in the couch or office chair. When I’ve become super focused, the towel just sort of slips down and I forget about it because I don’t want to lose the idea or thought. But then, even if I’m alone, I get self conscious, but I digress (and yes, I know some of you are cringing, and I’ll get to that in a little bit).
You see, if I have an idea, and I don’t happen to have something to catch those thoughts near or on me, the idea filters away like any dream because of the distractions that lie between me and that idea-catcher, and that’s if I ever get to it before my mind jumps ship a hundred or more times.
Dolly Parton is one of my favorites from the celebrity pantheons. To me, her and Tina Turner are the queens (there are others but these two have equal footing in my mind and are especially right now significant).
I mention Dolly Parton specifically because, though I can’t remember which interview it was (and it was maybe decades ago) she told her interviewer that she kept notebooks everywhere. There was a notebook in every room. There was a notebook next to the tub, where many of her ideas seemed to come to her for many of the songs we love.
My shower walls are white tiled, and because I live subterranean, a little light filters in past the airplants with which I’ve lined the ledge of the single bathroom window. And I live alone. It is work to live alone, but it is also a great boon which I am hesitant to give up at this point in my life.
Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Ownwhy it’s important for women (and I’d say femmes) to have a space, if possible, of our own. That’s an old text, but I don’t think the need for that text has changed.
I think we also see this need in the way Frida Kahlo lived at La Casa Azul, where she had her separate house joined only by a walkway to Rivera’s. Would she have been able to create in the same ways she was without that space? I’ve always wanted my own house, and learning about Frida’s simply compounded that want.
It’s important to have our own spaces, and it’s important to have space within those spaces which reflect back maybe a blankness and a silence. I love my messy apartment where my work can clutter all of the desks and tables, and what I love or what inspires me, haphazardly hangs on the walls. I especially love when I can walk through a span of days in my own home and take my time, not being beholden to any call or obligation written on the calendar.
Today is one of those days in which I have carried an idea, dripping through the house, to the page — and this is something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Roommates and partners enough have been frustrated by this tendency to the point that I’d broken the habit until today. I am in my own home with no one to worry about those wet spots but me.
What I realized is my shower is a small box or room with limited distractions. There is white noise, and the water massaging my skin and warming it. These, for me, are calming pleasures. I know also that they are special privileges for which I have worked in my life to have access to. I haven’t always had them, and I know that there are chances that I might not have them again.
The white tiles in my shower reflect that blankness I am so infrequently allowed, not only in my own space of hundreds of things to do, but in the wake of the constant seeming onslaught of attention economy grabs for whatever thought processes and inner workings I (and you) have. I have to figure out how to put blinders on, and sometimes that means I leave wet footprints throughout the apartment and head straight to something I can write with, and figure out the dressing and whatever else later (I’ve written in cold rooms wrapped in blankets, for example, and that was fine — it was what I needed to do).
Writing about this silly tendency I have, and have apparently reawakened, makes me remember the three loud years of what I called “the constant drone of construction” which was only drone because of the drone recordings I turned up in my earphones in order to be able to do my assigned work in my old neighborhood which was in a constant and cacophonous state of change.
I was working at the time for the now defunct Examiner.com, editing, curating, and writing what I call “regurgitated news” for a certain audience. It was part of my job, along with culling some of the numerous regurgitated news duplications on the site, to write two or three 3–800 word articles for the site’s readers. Because of the constant construction noise, this was difficult to do until I put those drone buds in, and frequently closed my eyes to create a blank slate before processing what I read and typing it up for my editors.
I have makeshifted my way to concentration numerous times, on buses, in busy academic cafeterias and coffee shops, on long walks, in parks and at other people’s houses. What I wished I had in those moments was a blank white room which I’ve been imagining as part of my dream house since I was little and did not know til about now, why I’d imagined that plain white room with nothing more inside than a chair or pillow to sit on, and the soft movement of curtains lit by the sun. For an idea of what I’m talking about, that movement of curtains, I mean, go sit in the room over at The Denver Botanic Gardens where you can find some of Ana Maria Hernando’sinstallations until January 2, 2022.
I like the idea of accompanying a blank slate of a room with white noise to block out whatever else sound might interrupt, like the unfamiliar shifts of a house, or the neighbors clomping back and forth across the ceiling or the constant river of cars roaring by (which of course is its own music when one is in the mood to recognize it as such).
None of what I’ve written above is always available. I suppose that’s why I call myself a “catch-as-can” writer. When my cell phone battery is charged, I can access a drone playlist, and mostly, if I haven’t removed them from my bag, I have a pen and a notebook on me to catch ideas if I can take a moment away from being pulled in every direction all at once.
Most of the time, I do not have my room or space or time, but I work towards having it all the time. I think that blanket forts could do the same thing for us. Not all of us can afford something like a Personal Space Isolation Helmet (:P).
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Originally published at https://sireneatspoetry.substack.com on October 28, 2021.
