Finding our own mental hospital

Starting at about eight years old, I often pretended to be a grown-up woman who lived in a mental hospital in England. It was a beautiful place, a huge white house on a hill surrounded by acres of manicured lawn.

I didn’t receive any mental health treatment in this fantasy institution. No electric shocks or drugs. Just an occasional friendly chat with a handsome doctor. White-clad nurses brought pineapple juice to me as I sat on one of the many verandas. But everyone pretty much left me alone because I was a brilliant writer and so just needed peace and quiet.

 My grandmother had an old typewriter, and as I sat on her porch and pounded away, I was the beautiful, mysterious writer on the veranda of the mental hospital.

I have no idea where I got this mental institution idea. From something I saw or read, I suppose. While my family was questionably mental, no one was ever institutionalized.

But I think, even then, I was longing for a very circumscribed life, a life centered on writing, a life of solitude (except for the occasional handsome doctor) and peace.

As writers, we all want that. And yet, we drive ourselves to have all the rest of what modern life has to offer. The house, stuff, tech, holiday decorating, entertainment, and vegetative pass-times.

For the last week, I’ve stayed with my mother in her new “independent living” digs. My little room contains only a few clothes and my books and writing. The day is formulaic. And some of the residents here are mental. So it has a lot of similarities to my childhood fantasy, only without the handsome resident psychiatrist and his British accent.

I feel a calm here that I don’t feel in my house, where so much always needs to be done. It makes me wonder why we long for peace and then do everything in our power to hold peace at bay. Is it because in our core we are afraid of that empty space where we must confront our talent or lack of it? Why do we choose the distraction over the silence when the distraction is really what is empty and the silence is weighted with possibility?

 I guess each of us has to answer that question for himself, and I urge you to give that some thought, to figure out what your own personal equivalent of my childish mental hospital might be for you. But I think we instinctively know what we need, just as I did even at eight years old. Solitude, peace to think, time to write. Cute psychiatrist optional.