So how do you know when your “home office” has become your cave? How do you know when your ability to be comfortable when alone crosses over into drooling shut-in status, minus the drool? (Or plus the drool for that matter. It just tends to be that CSI giveaway that’s hard to ignore.) How long have family and friends avoided asking what you’ve been up to because they just don’t know how to make sense of what you do with your days? And if you happen to offer up that you’ve been working, how long has that puzzled expression crossed their brow, the one that says doesn’t work pay?
How long has everyone around you been wondering if what you really are is a hobbyist who’s run out of track for her miniature choo-choo?
So how do you know you’ve become a hermit writer?
I mean, it’s not like you grow up whispering such intentions to your best friends, right after everyone confides which one of the Bee Gees they’d do. It’s not like there was a career day that changed your life. Do they ever? For anyone? It’s not like that frumpy sweater was always so comfortable. Perhaps it wasn’t even always frumpy.
Rather, becoming a hermit writer is a subtle evolution. One day you’ve got a normal job like everyone else. The next day you’re fired. (Was that the first hint at your inability to blend?) The next day you’re writing something wretched but determined to stick with it. The next day you’re avoiding the phone. By the next day—and by day, I’m clearly speaking of biblically proportioned epochs in personal history—unless you’re either starving or receiving knocks on your door from social service agents called by concerned neighbors who couldn’t handle the smell any longer, you have no flipping idea how Howard Hughes you’ve gone on your own ass.
Until.
An event large or small forces you out of your hole, and you realize that there was a little item you missed while away, something you didn’t get.
The memo.
What memo, you ask? Exactly.
It’s the memo that would have told you that time had turned its butt to you and gone the other direction, that the smallest atomic matter of your life had changed, that whole children had become adults, that some things had become easier and you were doing it the hard way, that some things had become harder and you were in denial, that one space between sentences had usurped two, that they weren’t called memos anymore.
I suppose the typical reaction to such rude removal from the cave is to return posthaste. But all is not lost. Emerging and returning is the stuff of the tale of life itself. Is it not? So there you go, more fodder for the page.
Dana Speer 