A Really Good Day(24)

But something about his space bothered me, too. My desk faced a wall, something my husband enjoys but I despise. I could roll my chair back to look out the window, but still I felt claustrophobic. I am, it seems, a poor workman, and I blamed my tools for my creative frustrations. After a while, I just stopped going out to the studio to work.

The couch that my husband bought recently to make me more comfortable has only made matters worse. His workstation, now in the middle of the room to make way for the couch, takes up all the available floor space. Then there is a matter of the stuff: the obsolete audio equipment, the mid-century radios, the reel-to-reels, the three or four or eleven eight-track players, the turntables, speakers, tuners, and amps. And let’s not forget the dolls, models, and figurines. The studio is adrift in bits and oddments that lend it a distinctive personality. That personality, a charming and delightful one, is my husband’s. Aside from a few photos of the children, a row of books on the bottom of one of the bookcases, and a bulletin board on which I can tack up notes and images for the project I am working on, there is nothing of mine in the studio. Though he’s welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend who’s been given a drawer in a bachelor pad bathroom.

Today I had, as ever, a hard time getting comfortable enough in the studio to focus. I lay on the couch, my feet up on a pillow. Unsurprisingly, I dozed off.

When I woke, I gazed at the furnishings in the office, so charmingly expressive of my husband’s iconoclastic personality. Then I looked around my little corner with its sad, few things. I leapt up, ran out to the storage shed, and found an empty cardboard box. I shoved all of my things into the cardboard box, tossed the box into the back of the shed, and surveyed the space. Without my few objects trying to assert a partial dominion, the studio felt like it belonged entirely to my husband. It felt right.

I sat down on the couch and happily got to work, my mood profoundly altered. I don’t need to share my husband’s studio. I can work anywhere. On a couch in the corner of the room, at a table in a café, in the library. I am nimble and free from the constraints of needing to have a room of my own. According to her nephew who penned a biography, Jane Austen didn’t require an elaborate, secluded space: “She had no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions.” If Pride and Prejudice could be produced under such circumstances, only a pretentious fool with an overly precious sense of her own importance would demand a place of her own, free of vintage eight-track players, in which to write.





Day 10


Microdose Day

Physical Sensations: Weirdly conscious that one of my eyes sees better than the other.

Mood: Wonderful. Happy. Content. Another really good day.

Conflict: None.

Sleep: Seven hours.

Work: Wonderfully productive. I see why some people microdose as a substitute for Adderall.

Pain: Much less.





It’s surprisingly difficult to squeeze precisely two drops of liquid into one’s own mouth. I have to do it in the mirror, and even so there’s a certain fraught quality to the experience, as I am terrified of accidentally ingesting too much. I must have looked frazzled when I came into the house this morning, because one of my kids gave me a suspicious look.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Where were you?”

“Um, just, you know,” I mumbled, fishing for time, “taking a walk.”

“Why?”

“It’s supposed to, like, improve my mood or something.” I winced. Why was I sounding like a fourteen-year-old whose mother notices her red eyes (“I was, like, riding my bike behind a bus or something”)?*1

“Good,” he said. “Walk longer.” Ordinarily, that’s just the kind of sass that might put a damper on my mood, but not today, Satan!

“Very funny,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t think it works like that. More isn’t necessarily more. In fact, in this case less is more.”

But by then he had already lost interest and wandered into the kitchen in search of breakfast.

It feels a little uncomfortable to be keeping this experiment a secret from my kids. From the very first time our kids asked about drugs, while listening to the radio (“Dad, when he says he gets ‘high with a little help from his friends,’ he doesn’t mean high like on drugs, does he?”), my husband and I have tried to be forthright. (“Yes, he means high on drugs.”) We talk about which drugs have a high potential for abuse and injury, and how to avoid those perils, and we also talk about which drugs are relatively safer. We try to be very clear about the risks and rewards of drug use.

All of this frank talk inevitably invites questions about our own drug use. My husband and I have always operated on the principle that, though we don’t owe our children an answer to every one of their questions, when we do choose to say something, we owe them the truth. If the kids ask us if we’ve done a certain drug and we don’t feel that they’re old enough to understand the answer or even if we just prefer not to say, we’ll tell them that. Otherwise, we grit our teeth and fess up. We never lie.

I’m surprised, frankly, that so many parents do. Or perhaps it’s not lying. Perhaps it’s collective amnesia. A number of years ago, we were dropping off our kids at sleep-away camp and bumped into an old college friend of mine. His son is older than my kids, and was already applying to college. I asked if his son was looking at Wesleyan, our alma mater. God forbid, my old friend told me. The school has such an intense drug culture!