A Gorgeous, Ugly Day In Bed

Fighting the shame of holing up on a beautiful day.

On Memorial Day, I locked myself inside my apartment and spent five hours in bed working on my next novel. Before that, I spent three hours spread on my living room couch also working on my novel.

The weather outside was gorgeous. Bright blue sky. Warm breeze. One little cloud like a cotton ball. The perfect third day of a long weekend.

I have a hard time with nice days. They fill me with guilt. I feel as if I should go outside, that I’m wasting something if I don’t. But when I have free time what I mostly want to do, especially when I’m in the throes of a project, is sit amongst blankets in the comfort of my home for hours working on that project. This is why I can never live in LA for any extended period of time, the constant, grating pressure of the sun would overwhelm.

In the warm breeze of my living room, I played my usual mental game. I imagined where I would go and what I would do if I were to take a vacation. I pictured sitting on a comfortable lounge chair somewhere and reading a book or working on my novel. Occasionally dipping into the warm bath of the ocean before me and sipping a Pina Colada, sure, but the essence of my imaginary vacation would be peace and rest and time. And so I allowed myself, in the comfort of my modest living room, to open all the windows, look out at the bright blue sky (I live in a rented Brooklyn apartment, it’s not a great view, but I can see the sky and that’s something around here) and pretend I was on vacation.

It’s all very depressing to admit. I feel like a sad mole person with no life. My thoughts spiral: I should have more and want more than my stupid little words on my dumb little page. Shouldn’t I be, for example, interacting with other humans, or even just nature? Isn’t that the “right” way to spend one’s time? What am I running from or avoiding by keeping my head down on the page all day?

There’s an entirely different way to frame this, of course. The above is the bully version of my consciousness. But I could also relish in the fact that what I want most is time and space and rest and that’s exactly what I’m giving myself, that I do have other things in my life that I could enjoy if I wanted to but by keeping my eyes on my project all day I’m doing the very opposite of running. The cheerleader version of my consciousness could—if she wasn’t so shy—feel proud of defining and trusting my own version of pleasure. The reality is somewhere in between (always). The decision to hole up all day is neither shameful nor heroic, it’s simply valid, a perfectly fine decision if that’s what I’m into.

I share an image on Instagram in an attempt to help myself feel okay about what, at certain mental angles, feels like a “wasted” day because it has become increasingly, terrifyingly hard to access pride without the supplemental heft of other people’s validation. But of course doing so introduces a whole new, different wave of shame.

Instagram rewards a very specific type of activity, specifically the kind that yields good pics. And sadly, me in my old sweats, not moving an inch all day, hair wild, in my completely average looking apartment, does not make for great visual content. The shame associated with solitude in a culture that rewards extroversion has been around forever but I wonder if the hyper-visual, superficially-social nature of Instagram hasn’t implanted a different, more insidious type of shame. For the past ten years or so, since Quiet was published and everyone started calling themselves “extroverted introverts,” carving out time alone, embracing solitude, has grown increasingly en vogue (wonderful). But this new wave of shame lies in the visuals of the enterprise: are you alone in the perfect cabin, on a gorgeous hike, literally smelling flowers? Solitude is lauded if you capture it just right. But solitude performed through the lens of other people’s consumption isn’t actually solitude. One of the many beauties of solitude is that no one else can see it. And so I hate myself, as usual, for posting a pic.

I care very little about physical beauty. It’s almost an issue, how little I notice in the physical world around me. I do not need a “beautiful” space. I need blankets and pillows and silence. It’s become an ongoing theme in my relationship whereby my architect partner will hang very nice things around our apartment that I don’t notice for days. Sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I imagine a singular prison-like room all to myself with nothing in it in the middle of nowhere and my spirits are instantly lifted. And so I continued to lay on my bed, motionless other than wild eyes and flailing fingers.

My favorite part of writing a novel is when I become fully and wholly consumed by it, when editing it becomes a compulsion and I have to fight to put it down because everything I see reminds me of a theme here or a scene there and my notes doc where I scribble little thoughts for later has gotten unwieldy. This isn’t how I feel most of the time in the novel-writing process. A lot of the time, especially in the early stages (by “early” I mean, like, at least the first 6 months), I’m trudging through chapter by chapter, figuring out how to fill the page, writing until something spills out that I can point to and say, oh there it is, that’s why I started writing this in the first place and then I cut most everything else and start the trudging all over again in hopes of finding more of the gold. But once you have a full first draft it can start to feel alive, pieces working together, themes beating through chapters even in places you didn’t specifically plan them to but because these notions that you’ve planted like seeds actually really did somehow, miraculously grow over the course of the story.

Which is wonderfully where I found myself last weekend. And to really wrap your head around hundreds of pages, hold it as its own entity, you have to create a lot of empty space in your mind to let it all in—this made up world and its characters and their sometimes bat-shit dramas that you’ve constructed from scratch.

The title is an abbreviation; will share actual title later!

Bed might sound like an odd choice. I’ve read enough ‘ten tips to be productive’ articles or whatever to know that the expert advice is decidedly to keep bed for rest, like a kind of sleep sanctuary, and do your work someplace else. I have to wonder, though, when reading these rote, tedious lists, if the authors have ever lived in New York City where your room choices aren’t exactly plentiful. But space restraints aside, I f’ing love working in bed. Especially on novels. It is, by far, the most comfortable place in my home, and as I said up top, when I dive into the novel, I’m editing for hours. And unless I’m getting paid, I can’t possibly be bothered to sit up straight or hold my head up for that long.

Mostly, though, bed facilitates dreaming, which I find essential to a long-form project. In order to make any real progress on hundreds of pages you have to somehow get inside of it, hold the story in your brain, and work with it as a unified thing. The concentration required, I’ve found, is almost other-worldly, literally a sort of dream state. I have to inhabit a reality where all of it feels wildly real, where every detail matters, and I can play scenes out in my head. To do this, I need to move myself as far as possible from actual reality (a privilege to be sure), even my own physicality—I often feel dizzy and catatonic when I look up. Maybe a mental health professional is reading this and all the red flags are waving, but no one ever claimed being a novelist was psychologically conducive.

If my partner happens to forget not to interrupt me when I’m bed like this, he’ll remember as soon as he walks in and I look up as if I’ve been kidnapped and the blindfold is suddenly off—where am I, what are you saying, leave me alone! He’ll tell me I look crazy, which I consider success, proof that I fully inhabited my own world. And the commute from that fictional world in my head back to my physical reality is never instantaneous.

Perhaps part of the reason shame so acutely overwhelms when I spend an entire day in bed is because for most of my adult life—from about 18 to 36—I was addicted to exercise. On a day that I didn’t run, I felt too worthless to socialize or even eat, like I didn’t deserve to be in the world. Running was a way to prove to myself that I’d done at least something worthwhile on any given day, simply existing wasn’t enough. It was only when I began to really let go of running that I began writing seriously. Of course exercise is good for the human body and for many people (who do not have extreme, addictive personalities like myself) it can be a wonderful part of your day. But my running routine was such that after work and then my run, I did not have energy for anything other than eating and drinking myself to sleep, often socializing in the process but not really there. Writing is not physical but it takes a wild amount of mental strength. And only when I allowed myself to stop compulsively moving physically did I have the energy to let myself run creatively.

This is not a full-fledged essay but a short-ish missive to say that if you feel like staying inside and not moving at all when the sun is bright and shining, don’t worry. Perhaps you’re a stronger person than I and were never worried to begin with. There are days when I’m that person, too. Maybe I was out of practice this week, spoiled by the comforting grey of winter and the steady showers of spring. But some days the doubt creeps in and I need to be reminded that even though I can’t take a perfect photo of my day, it doesn’t mean that, at least for me, that that day wasn’t perfect.

Recommendation:

I can’t stop reading Patricia Highsmith. Her mix of clean, incisive writing, with intense, suspenseful plot, and creepy, complex characters keeps me up way past my bedtime. I read The Price of Salt and Strangers on A Train a while back, and now I’m totally hooked on the Ripley series (pleasantly picturing Andrew Scott all the while). It’s not every day I get totally lost in a book, but I can’t put her down.

Love a built-in ribbon bookmark.

Speaking of which, my brilliant friend

Jillian Eugenios

does this amazing walking tour around the Village. It highlights the homes and haunts of LGBTQ+ writers who lived, worked or were incarcerated in Greenwich Village in the decades before the Stonewall Riots. As part of it, we stopped at Patricia Highsmith’s home, where I learned she was actually kind of a jerk, but it reminded me to pick up the Ripley series. Tours are typically not my thing but I was gripped the whole way through, can’t recommend it enough!