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I live in a very tiny flat over a fancy dress shop, which is far too small for its three highly-strung and hugely energetic householders alone, not to mention all of our friends and lovers.
For the past ten days, both my flatmates have been on home visists over the Easter, and I've finally had the place to myself.
Having lived with practically no private space for six months, I had been immensely looking forward to having noone to snipe at and be sniped at about chores, noone to tell me to turn my weird music down late at night, noone using my soy-milk or the bathroom when I wanted it. I was planning to write and write and occasionally have small breaks for british comedy.
However, barely four days in, I had been singularly unproductive, and was so sick of the quiet, the solitude, that I packed a rucksack and went to stay at another friend's houseshare in London for a few days.
Perhaps because I'm acutely aware of having grown up in a cold and unfriendly household from which I eventually ran at the age of seventeen that I crave company, bustle, would much rather tolerate constant low-level annoyance than loneliness; but I truly believe that some people were designed to function better in close and very mundane proximity to others - not only in terms of general happiness, but in terms of energy, productivity, creativity.
Of my friends who write, I find experiences to be almost exactly split: whilst some prefer to shut themselves away for hours, even days on end, others, like me, become much more productive, much more fired with creative energy when there's human noise and daily drama going on around them. Perhaps an awareness of the prescence of others going about their daily business that serves to bring one back to reality, in an intellectual state wherein one can very easily become 'overinvolved' and subsequently unproductive.
I don't think I would ever live alone, given the choice; in practical terms, I personally feel it IS far less wasteful to live with others, but, extending that analogy to an emotional sphere, for many of us, creative energy that emanates from general wellbeing is similarly wasted when one is living alone. |
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