Losing My Nerve in the Office of my Dreams

When we first bought our house, a three story 1890s rowhome (skinny and tall, flanked by identical sisters on either side), I would come up to the third floor, a sprawling attic space with vaulted ceilings on all sides and a sky-blue painted patchwork floor, and sit on the floor with my face in the sun.

The attic space had three windows, but two of them—the only two in the entire house, faced south. The sun streamed in all day long, splitting light in slants across the space.

My current office was freshly cobbled together in one of the second floor bedrooms but the lack of sunlight on the ground floor and the second floor was getting to me. By three months in, I felt a kind of hum beneath my skin, the sort of itch you can’t scratch but threatens to drive you quite literally crazy. I was doubling up my vitamin D, getting outside when I had the chance, but it was nearing winter and I couldn’t drag my desk out there to work.

We made a plan and hired two young guys from an app to help us. Every book, every stick of furniture that could fit up the narrow Victorian attic steps, every plant and poster, knick-knack and piece of nostalgia, it went up to the third floor.

I bought cheap shag rugs to cover the cold floor and held my nose and purchased flat pack chairs and a terribly uncomfortable couch. I scoured facebook marketplace for bookshelves that could nestle up against knee walls and haggled good-naturedly with a shop owner to buy one they used for display. I hung every stitch of art I’d collected over the years, organized my books by subject first and then by color because I am the boss of me, took apart my desk and screwed it back together for the ninth time since I’ve had it and probably the hundredth since it’s been in existence.

I finally bought a monitor for my laptop since my eyesight was (and is) still not playing nice. I unfolded a folding table and stuck it in the corner, filled it with art supplies I’d never had room to sprawl out with before. On the vaulted ceilings, I stuck sticky notes for book drafting and in the windows I hung holograph clings, plants, lights, and prisms. I added a disco ball in a few months later and it was the best decision. I give it a spin every morning when I come up the stairs and it keeps on spinning, even til its last turn and sway, spreading breathing spots of light across my wall.

Every morning, I come downstairs into a dark house. The scrap of sunlight we get comes for one hour in midafternoon this time of year. By May, it will not come at all. I eat my breakfast and then move, as if called by the light, to my space on the third floor.

Someone asks me if I am doing the best work of my life in this space and I don’t know how to answer them. The truth is that I feel I have done the worst work of my writing life in this space. I feel bad saying it because I know what a stupid and absolute privilege it is to have this “room of my own.” It is the envy of writers who are squeezing their words in from noisy coffee shops and during toddler naps and from their chronic illness beds.

I should be doing the best work of my life in this space.

But mostly I am taking to heart George Saunders’s advice for writers who don’t appear to be doing anything at all, “My subconscious is hunting for a solution.”

At least that’s what my subconscious is telling myself.

I am making art, though. At least that’s what I call it. It’s collage, which is my favorite art-form but has always felt a little like cheating, even, perhaps a form of plagiarism. I’m dabbling in watercolors and tiny sketches in tiny sketchbooks. I’m learning book-making, and by that I mean, not the kind of book making I have done in the past—writing words to put in books—but actually making books from paper and thread, glue and ribbon. I am reading a lot of prose and a lot of poetry too.

I am sitting in a chair and staring at the wall or staring at art other people have made or listening to my husband on meetings in his office below me or looking at my dogs who come up with me every single morning and stay with me between their many potty breaks throughout the day.

I am trying to write words.

These are words, this thing I’m writing now. But they aren’t the words I thought I would be writing at this juncture of my life.

I wanted to be sage and seasoned, rested and sure. Instead I’m antsy and humming and thrumming and wondering. I feel at the end of something and on the cusp of something but in between the two for a very, very, very long time. I feel like I have to admit I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know how to approach the page or the words or the work or the worth of it anymore.

When I read something wonderful and want to engage it with words, I ask myself, “Why? Why does the world need my words in addition to these already wonderful words? Why not just leave it to speak for itself?”

When I read something awful and want to engage it with words, I ask myself, “Why? Why draw attention to more of the awfulness that already exists in the world? Isn’t the world heavy enough?”

I look around me at this space that’s mine, all mine, and I can’t believe it’s mine.

I’ve been writing from armchairs in the middle of the night and desks shoved into corners and coffee shop nooks and the kitchen table for all my life. Those are the only places I’ve written and I’ve tried to fill them with words worthy of the spaces themselves.

And now here I am in a dream of a space and I think…well, a lot of the time I don’t think. I just try to think. I jot down half-baked ideas and quarter sentences, quotes from people who say things I like, quotes from people who are brave enough to say things at all, brave enough to say the things I used to be brave enough to say.

Someone asks me if I’m doing the best work of my life in this space and what I say, after I have discovered I have nothing else to say, is that “I think I have lost my nerve.”

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