I’m more flexible now that I’m rootless. I travel. My calendar is malleable. My spare time mostly unaccounted for.
I’m squeezing the good bits out of it. I lodge with a best friend a few nights a week and we stay up chatting just like when we lived in university halls together. I get pockets of time with my family I didn’t used to. I travelled to Edinburgh last week for a book launch and spent a day writing there. I’m thinking of a research trip to New York.
But somewhere in this fluid state, I lost sight of my priorities.
South Norwood Library by Brutalist Library SE25
Suddenly, I don’t have a reason to say no to things. Without commitments that mean I need someone to bend their plans to fit in with mine, I bend my own to work around theirs.
For a time, it’s what I needed: to be driven by the certainty of someone else’s plans while mine were so hazy. It gave me direction and routine when I couldn’t find it for myself. But now I’m having to challenge myself to establish my own priorities again and live by them.
I need silence to write. It’s annoying for me, and it’s annoying for anyone I live with. Growing up, the fights my sister and I would have over the volume of her music were vicious. It’s the reason why, as an adult, I invested in noise cancelling headphones as soon as they were invented.
I haven’t had a proper desk set up since before the pandemic. I worked in an office then where I had a desktop computer to call my own and had fun arranging magazines and pen pots around it. Now, I have a small collection of tech that I unpack wherever I am. Searching for a quiet place to set up in, I rediscovered libraries.
From Cambridge to Huntingdon, Edinburgh to Kings Cross and Colliers Wood - each one I walk into has that familiar bookish smell, a fluttering of pages and tapping of keyboards. An atmosphere that feels calmer than an office but more intentional than a home. There’s usually someone getting quietly frustrated at the printer.
People pad in and out but always slowly. They’re patient and mindful of disturbing anyone’s focus. Walking in there myself makes me slow down and feel thoughtful. I try to find a window seat.
When the doors slide open they let a blast of the outside world in - the traffic, the chatter, the pace. And then they close and there are inside voices again, the gentle tapping - a sort of sensory deprivation.
People around me keep their voices down, moving slowly so as not to disturb, willing me to stay focussed. There’s a mutual appreciation for how precious the concentration is that we find here. Something we all have to work very hard for when phone and email notifications tug at our attention.
The separation of what’s out there and what’s inside helps me to distance myself from distractions in my own life. I leave behind the thoughts and conversations that I don’t need to bring here. It makes it easier to find a flow. Committing to spending days here is a way to ring-fence my time so I don’t bend or adapt my plan to squeeze too much in.
Good things have come out of time I’ve spent in a library in the past. Friendships formed over intense university projects, a dissertation and now the line in the sand I needed to pull myself back to my priorities.
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Oh I love the idea of writing in a library. Takes me back to my school days where I had to go to the local one to write essays. The work didn’t get done, otherwise! Home life was noisy. As it is again. So I may need to explore our new library!