I recently took myself off to a self-prescribed writing retreat. I had a deadline looming and the pressure of being at home with three kids and a partner still working from home became too much. So I booked into a hotel in the city for five days. Five whole days away from the family and all my daily responsibilities. Yes my purpose on the retreat was to write, but what I didn’t expect was the impact it had on my mental health.
As anyone who lives with multiple young children will tell you, along with the many obligations they bring, they are also noisy beings. It took me a whole day in my hotel room before I realised the reason I felt so at peace was because of the lack of noise. There were no Zoom meetings happening in the background, no child shouting to have their bottom wiped, or wondering what they could eat. There were no squabbles I had to intervene in, no ticking clock to remind me that a meal time was approaching. I just had space and silence.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf wrote in her book A Room of One’s Own.
It reminded me of a famous quote from the writer Virginia Woolf. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf wrote in her book A Room of One’s Own. There isn’t a writer, male or female who would disagree. We need space of our own to carve out and make sense of the internal worlds we bring to life on the page. But as was true when Woolf wrote her work in 1929 and is true now, most women, especially if they are caring for dependants, don’t have the time and space to call their own. And as I began to find out on my retreat, a room or space of your own isn’t just beneficial for writers, but should be something all women should seek out.
When Woolf wrote about a woman needing a room of her own, her own space, she also implied that the space didn’t need to just be physical, but mental and emotional. Hardly any of us have a whole day where we focus on just the one job. Our days instead are a juggle of numerous tasks at work, at home and outside of it. We are negotiating relationships, navigating changes both personal and professional. To be able to put a stop to that and find space, a room, even for a short while, could be immensely helpful.
Before I went on my retreat, many of my friends asked me how I would control the urge to ignore my writing and instead lounge around in bed eating room service and watching Netflix all day. In fact this question was asked so often by multiple different women that I had to conclude the idea of doing nothing was perhaps the biggest fantasy many women, especially mothers, held deep inside their chest.
Imagine, doing nothing – just lying there chilling out, eating what you wanted, while watching something other than AB Kids? How good does that sound?
I of course had to control myself from those urges. I had a task at hand and I needed something to show for the time and expense of taking myself away from a busy family life. Thankfully I managed to make some good headway with my work and before I knew it, the five days were at an end and I was making my way home.
As I approached my house, bracing myself for the inevitable chaos I would find inside, which I had to admit I missed - I bumped into a neighbour. She remarked that I looked refreshed. She didn’t know I had gone away for five days by myself and when I told her she said, ‘well that makes sense.’
It indeed made sense. Who wouldn’t feel like a whole new person after spending time with space and silence, away from their daily responsibilities? I had worked damn hard over the last five days but for some reason I felt revitalised.
Later as I was talking to a friend, I told her how I felt. It inspired her to want to book a couple of days away from her family as well, just for a break. I hope she ends up doing it. In fact, after my experience I believe any woman would find even a day or two away from her daily life to be the best spa experience ever. You don’t need a massage, you just need a day in a quiet room to do as you please with no one demanding anything from you.
For many of us it may be impossible to have a whole room to ourselves as Woolf once suggested, but it doesn’t mean that from time to time we can’t book a space just to call our own. It might be the best form of self-care you end up doing.
Saman Shad is a writer working on her first novel out with Penguin in 2023 and a novella out on Audible in the latter half of 2022. You can follow her on Twitter .
