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It’s holiday time. Holiday time can be depressing. This is the time of the year when store windows sing with (commercial) cheer, house decorations insist we be HAPPY, and families flaunt their families. In turn, the “holiday blues” can set in just around now: From November to January, people who-are-often-loners-but-generally-feel-OK can get atypically depressed.
Holidays suggest we should be more joyfully social than a lot of us naturally are. So we doubt our simple love of solitude. A pressure for bliss can also make our (naturally imperfect) family or friendships annoy us all the more.
Who Parties?
Modern psychology makes a very cool distinction between people who thrive on stimulating environments and those who don’t. The distinction actually came out of research on pain thresholds: Some of us are more stoic about events like jamming our fingers or breaking our ankles than others are. In 1967, a researcher named Asenath Petrie defined two types of personalities: the “augmenter” and the “reducer.” The “augmenter” is sensitive to excitement: She feels pain more than most and dislikes other types of chaos, including heavy drinking and loud noise. In contrast, the “reducer” has a high threshold for action. She loves a party and is a social type; she has a bigger tolerance for pain, seeks crowds, and tends to turn her music up louder than others do. So: Different people have different relationships to stimuli. Some can’t get enough of the crowd; some like to shut it down.
This difference doesn’t even come close to explaining all the reasons why some people in your family like to launch the toast and belt out Christmas carols while some sneak away to the porch with a novel. But these scientifically proven differences can obviously be comforting things to think about: If you sometimes feel like the Grinch at Christmas time, the impulse might, in part, be simply natural. Some people don’t thrive in the hubbub of a crowd.
My book, A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf, is part psychology, part memoir, and partly a loving tribute to a novelist I’ve studied for a long time. I’m a literature professor who began training in clinical psychology because I loved the vivid window Woolf offered onto the mind. I still consider Woolf to be history’s big genius (even among psychologists) in describing how the head works.
In one chapter of my book, I describe Woolf’s appreciation for occasional solitude. Woolf thought it was a big mistake to think you could ever fully crack open and know another person. Sometimes (especially at holidays?), we crave complete intimacy with others. We dream of a mind-meld with friends or family. But that ideal can be a dangerous illusion, Woolf says. A more stable stance actually means respecting people’s differences, or accepting the limitations in fully “knowing” people you love.
Holiday months make this message a big one for me. Holidays have absorbed the tone of a lot of American culture, in which bigger and bolder feel right. We live in a culture that increasingly demands exposure—that demands we say it all, quick and straight. In our political talk shows, for instance, the smartest and snappiest guests are ones who can reduce their ideas to a soundbite. And, in our online lives (in Myspace pages, dating services) utter self-exposure seems normal. But Woolf wants to save the other human impulse: toward quiet, and toward solitude. She called privacy necessary for a deep, creative life. In privacy, we have a chance to reject or accept other people’s advice. In privacy, we also think through things with less self-consciousness—and so nurture our original voices. We don’t feel a need to simplify our ideas so much; we appreciate ambivalence. In solitude, we escape the holiday insistence on a steely-bright smile.
When Virginia Woolf encourages us to value solitude, she gives us a bit of encouragement through holiday blues. If you’re coming home from some holiday dinner and feel, I just want to be alone, she understands the need. She celebrates it. She tells you to just go to bed with a book, already. Be an “augmenter” for a day, she essentially says, and why not?
Tomorrow: I’ll talk about Woolf’s advice on breaking routines.
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Ilana Simons, 
A Life of One's Own, 
Virginia Woolf, 
guide, 
biography, 
20th century literature, 
human nature, 
personal growth, 
fulfillment, 
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psychology, 
Penguin Books, 
books
Hoildays - solitude - being caught up in it.....
I liked your book, although I have my own minor points of view to offer to yours. I am not debating, or attempting to change, or 'straighten' out anyone's mind. To base my application of Virginia Woolf's psychology to mine, I would first have to understand her, and her writing. I have not studied her, as I know you must have, to come to your conclusions, but what I have read of her books, and from others' points of view, I see something I wasn't prepared for. I see someone who is caught in the middle of knowing, and wanting to know what her writing was doing to herself, and what it was doing to others. The point of writing? Caught is the one word I keep finding in her writing. I knew she wanted that solitude, just as I can, and crave, but she also wanted recognition for a number of reasons. Here is the dilemma for the writer, as I see it: How can you have both? You want the recognition, but when it happens, what then? I wonder just how much of this recognition, or lack of it, drove her to her distracted states of mind. I read it in her writing. I hear it in the voice of her characters. She was all over the pages with her questions. She's up, she's down, she's all around. These moments of solitude are wonderful, when they CAN be creative. It's what a creative mind thrives on - but when it's not creative, there is nothing but emptiness. Forcing creativity when it isn't there, can hurt the process.......the objective, and the mind. Emptiness comes in all forms, also: The anger, the outbursts, the distractions of these moments, can heighten during these holiday times of the year. The pressures of the holidays can be enormous, and the 'big and bold' times that we live in can be augmented until everything in our lives is all blown out of proportion. You are right, retreat to a place of 'peace and quiet'. In Virginia's life: I know what you've said, about what may, or may not have brought her to her demise. It all has a bearing on why she ended it all. Everything in her life, as well as ours, adds to each new perspect of 'every' day of our lives. Do you push it, or pull all of these influences away? But I feel that solitude can also be over-rated. Sticking in the solitary lifestyle, without the friends and family to support you, can also bring on pressures even more. Speaking for myself, I've felt these pressures, but in the same breath, I fight them just the same. I want to be who I am, when I want it. Basicially, no one can tell me differently - how to live my life. But, again...... We avoid situations that put demands upon us. We avoid people, and certain life-styles, and where does it get us? Yes, we can say we have the guts to do what we want, and then we become labled as a loner. How does that feel to us? Putting yourself out 'there' will, as I said, bring you in the realm of being caught in the middle....between yourself, and the world around you, which includes people who love you. Where do you place the importance? I find myself getting stuck in the middle of it, at times. How much to participate in the holiday, without loosing the spirit of it all, which is what it's about, the spirit.....how much to hold back from people? How much is enough? When is enough, enough? Who gets mashed in the middle when we can't make up our minds, and choose a side------me or them? Yes, it can be a catch 22 situation. But I think the end results have to come from knowing someone, or situation, well enough, to know when enough, IS enough. As old as I am, I am still learning-----I have, and I can, still choose the wrong sides. Then again.....is there a wrong side?