In Defense of Being Boring at Parties

Community is you & me & maybe no one else?

Most of the writers I love lived alone in some way. Rilke in castles, Baldwin in borrowed rooms, Carson in her margins. García-Márquez’s whole life thesis was solitude. Even when surrounded by people, they wrote like they were speaking across a distance only they could cross. The music I return to…Cohen, Bach, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwalis and ghazals…often sounds like it first began in a room with the lights off. I’ve known this solitude since before I had words for it, a kind of tuning fork inside me that goes quiet in company. Particularly in the buzzy, beer-washed, flickering lights, marijuana-soaked company that naturally becomes louder as the night grows deeper.

I don’t go to (m)any MFA gatherings anymore. I used to, at first, (once or twice times once or twice let’s be honest). I’d stand in the kitchen with a drink in my hand and try to say one thing worth remembering…something that might land in someone’s notebook later. There’s a compulsion under the surface, quiet but constant. To be memorable. Even among the soft-voiced and well-read, you can feel it in the room: people listening just enough to return serve, to be seen listening. It’s not cruel per say… just exhausting. Everyone wants something from you. A line. A connection. A future blurb. And you want something too…maybe even the same things. But you also want stillness, and that makes you feel like a problem.

The word community comes from the Latin communis: shared, held in common. But the idea is older than that. In Sanskrit, sangha refers to a community bound by practice as opposed to personality — people gathered by shared seeking, not just mere social compatibility. In Urdu, mehfil suggests a gathering of mood (beyond a bubble populated by people)…a space shaped by poetry, music…the divine. Both words point to something quieter than networking (ugh), and far less interested in utility. I’ve been thinking of Simone Weil, who wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. I want that kind of community. One where to be present is enough. One where you’re not punished for being difficult to summarize.

Solitude doesn’t ask you to explain yourself. It lets you linger in the half-thought, the not-yet-ready-to-say. But in most social rooms (and I mean this digitally also, of course) — even well-meaning literary ones — there’s pressure to perform. To have a position. To charm. To turn yourself into something people can quickly parse.

I don’t think solitude makes me better (on the contrary, it’s probably a kind of problem). I do think it makes me bearable to myself, for now. I read slowly, reread often, forget entire pages and remember single lines for years. I listen to music on loop until it becomes part of the room. I sit with thoughts long after they’ve stopped being useful. None of this makes me more interesting at a party. I don’t metabolize experience quickly. I don’t have takes. And I’m not interested in being easily understood.

Maybe that’s what I mean by boring. An unwillingness to trade my interior life for a cleaner (more charming? entertaining? vivacious?) story about myself.

Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It’s what happens right before wonder. Pascal once wrote that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” What might come if we didn’t flinch the moment attention softens and disbands? If we let the stillness stretch and stretch like a cosmic cat, enveloping us in its soft fur of oblivion…okay, maybe that’s a weird image…but also…boredom often begets such weirdness…and such weirdness, these oddities…these are me…and they are all of us, in their myriad of contracting, expanding ways.

Our culture today teaches us to fear boredom. To cover it with scrolling and constant sound and straight-to-the-vein mega-shots of serotonin. Yet boredom is often where the dream begins. Fellini spoke of needing long stretches of silence, an interior hygiene, for images to come. Duras believed that when one is truly bored, the mind is finally free to go strange, that the writer, in particular, “must always be enveloped by a separation from others.” Children understand this best, before we train it out of them. Left alone, they slip into worlds. A line of ants becomes a war. A puddle becomes the sea. Boredom, in its pure form, is a rehearsal for magic.

Which is why I wish to protect mine. I’m trying very hard these days to not fill the hours between writing and working and mothering (which is…it’s fucking hard, let me tell you but even more important because of their scarcity). I’m learning to let that “free” time echo. I want to go on long walks more often, especially now as fall approaches, without podcasts and *gasp* without music! To fold laundry slowly (and, erm, hopefully not after 2 weeks post-washing). I’m staring into space more often, which I’m glad to report as a major improvement for myself. I don’t always enjoy it. But I’ve learned that wonder doesn’t arrive on command — it arrives in the space boredom clears.

So, yes, circling back to parties and all that — no, I don’t go to gatherings anymore (and I’m also trying to be less and less online…if you think this is me being online, man you shoulda seen me before). Some people need that kind of energy around them…bodies in a room, the hum of talk, the feeling of being near the center of something (and transpose all that digitally). I get it. I even admire it in some way. But I’ve learned that it’s not what makes me feel most alive.

Community can be small and even private…two minds meeting in a shared margin. The other night Ana and I sat side by side reading The Body Book. We got stuck on the spleen. How strange it looks. How it doesn’t seem real. It looks like a whale, she said. Or the inside of a whale. And before I could respond, we were already somewhere else entirely—talking about imaginary fairy islands tucked in the bellies of whales, how the whales keep them safe by swimming through cold currents so no one else can find them.

That, to me, is community too — a shared, personal willingness to follow a moment wherever it wants to go. And I’m deeply grateful of course that I have a husband who is also a writer and as dedicated to relearning this act of solitude paired with a kind of spiritual solidarity…to be dedicated to the work of writing and writing well right alongside me. What I most look forward to in our relationship now, above all else, is not a date at the movies or going out in that sense, but the hours and hours we sometimes spend awake at night just talking…beginning from a favorite part in a book and ending…well…it never really ends, and for that, I’m glad.