Burning the Haystack in A Room of My Own: The Boring Reality Behind the Revolution

In celebration of National Singles Week, 2025

Image credit: Andrea Kowch, “Beyond Here”

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Burned Haystack was not my life plan. I’m delighted with everything that’s happened, but I’m just saying it wasn’t my plan.

My plan, until about a week before I launched this project, had been to live happily ever after with my boyfriend, who also wanted a long-term monogamous partnership, but once he really thought about it maybe just not with me, and also maybe not right then because he didn’t want to rush into anything [at 54 after being together for two years] and because he “wanted to focus on parenting” [his children who are in their 30s].

So, okay. Those were his decisions. And I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. I’d moved to his town, an hour away from my job and most of my friends, a month before he made these pronouncements. The empty weekends now stretched out before me like a mocking void, like the punchline in a very low-stakes and anticlimactic Greek tragedy.

Inside my head, I thought, “Well, I guess I should start some kind of revolution.” I was saying it to myself as a joke. I’ve been joking with my students and my kid for years about how at some point I’d be starting a feminist revolution. The inspiration for the revolution shifted from day to day. Sometimes it was political; sometimes it was medical—I’ve been enraged at the medical industrial complex’s treatment of women for decades; sometimes it was just because I felt that my male colleagues were talking too much. 😂😂

I was never being serious. I wasn’t really serious this time, I was just trying to distract myself, and I figured if I was going to end up back on the apps then I might as well try to help other women and improve the whole situation along the way.

But maybe there was one tiny, tiny part of me that was serious, because for whatever reason, and without even thinking about it too much, I just started dedicating all of my new extra time and most of my energy into kicking off Burned Haystack.

I got kind of obsessed with it, both with the idea of Burned Haystack itself—the metaphor and the method—and with the conundrum of how to share it. I felt like I was walking around with a hot, glowing secret in my pocket, like something akin to a witchcraft spell, and I knew it could help women, and I knew that the work I could do with it was deep and wide, but it was all really just happening within my head—or within my laptop and notebooks—it was all just potential. I didn’t know how to birth it.

That’s what it felt like; it felt like I was nurturing this thing that needed to be born, but the path to that genesis was tenuous and unclear.

I started reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. I don’t remember how I came across it or why I even picked it up. The book lays out a 12-week program of creative practices to “reconnect to the inner artist,” and this felt like a structure I needed right then. I was simultaneously bursting with ideas in a way that sometimes felt chaotic, yet I was also intellectually focused in a way I’d never been before. Personally and emotionally, I was scattered and untethered—living in this town away from family and friends and suddenly un-partnered and unsure of everything. I spent hours just wandering along Lake Michigan staring at seagulls.

During those days, the ideas started percolating so constantly that it seemed like every walk or run turned into some sort of surprise epiphany about dating and rhetoric and feminism and the intersections thereof, and I just sort of . . . followed them. I truly had nothing else to do.

Simultaneously, I remember thinking, “This is very fascinating, but I’d trade it all in a heartbeat to have a partner again.”

I do not feel that way anymore.

It’s still a goal for me—a healthy partnership—but it’s no longer one I’m willing to sacrifice my own missions for. I have an agenda now, and I can’t let a man take me off track. The very thought of getting whipped up in some dramatic whirlwind romance right now is distasteful to me because it would get in the way of the work I’m doing with other women on Burned Haystack.

Give me partnership, yes, but make it calm and comforting and stable and sustainable.

I am no longer in the market for whirlwinds.

But back to The Artist’s Way: from the moment I cracked it open—and even now it strikes me as an odd choice—why did I choose a book on creativity practices rather than, say, marketing or entrepreneurism or harnessing social media? Who knows. But anyway, from the first page, a whole bunch of ideas began to resonate with me, literally to vibrate off the page, in a way that nothing ever has before. It was like finding religion.

I want to take you through some of the quotes that stopped me, that stood me still. I just copied these out of the journal I was keeping during that time. Here they are, along with some annotations.

“Creativity, like human life, begins in darkness . . . As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness.”

I was already there—I did feel like I was dwelling in darkness. Not so much in a depressive way as in a “lost” kind of way, a hidden way. I felt anonymous and invisible, living in this small town on the edge of a great lake. I felt like I couldn’t find my way to anything, or out of anything. This quote gave me the permission to simply remain there, to incubate myself and my ideas in darkness. I could be patient until the next move rendered itself clear. I would just keep working and not worry about it.

“It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.”

This passage stopped me in my tracks, especially the words “gestation” and “interior, murky, and completely necessary.” Those words glowed on the page for me. I’d already articulated to myself this sense of growing something that needed to be born—the gestation—and those descriptors were so spot-on—”interior and murky”—and I needed this permission too—that these things were “completely necessary.” This passage gave me license. I wasn’t just wandering around by the lake, I was cultivating something important, something helpful.

“Adventures don’t begin until you get into the forest. That first step is an act of faith.”

This was not a hard sell for me. I had way too much time on my hands, so I couldn’t even make an argument against stepping into some forest on faith alone. I had nothing else to do.

“There is a path for each of us. When we are on our right path, we have a sure footedness. We know the next right action—although not necessarily what is just around the bend. But trusting, we learn to trust.”

I felt this, precisely. I never had an “overall plan” for Burned Haystack. I just figured out what to do next, step by step, as the whole thing developed. At a certain point I got tangled up and couldn’t decide which way to take things, and that’s when I hired a consulting team for a short period of time to help me define things (this wasn’t until very recently, after most of you already knew me—this Substack and my book advance made it possible for me to do this; prior to that, it wasn’t a financial possibility for me). I think it’s important to recognize the juncture between what you can do on your own and when you need guidance: you have to trust yourself when the river is running clear and you feel that “sure-footedness,” but you also have to recognize when you lose footing, when you can’t quite see what runs beneath, what’s round the next bend. It’s important to know the difference.

“You can count on a thousand unseen helping hands. Take a small step in the direction of a dream and watch the synchronous doors fly open. Leap and the net will appear. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.”

I can see an argument for mocking this notion, the notion that if you leap, the Universe will catch you. I don’t know what to tell you. I have taken three significant leaps in recent years, three leaps in which I truly had no idea of what did or did not lie below—would the landing be soft or would it be shark-infested or full of jagged peaks? No idea. The first leap was leaving a dead-end job in Ohio and starting my life over 500 miles away from everything and everyone I knew, at age 46. The second leap I don’t talk about. The third was Burned Haystack. The Universe caught me every single time, and then it set me down in a way better place. So I don’t know; that’s only three examples applied to a data set of one, which is not predictive or scalable, but it feels like Truth.

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And now we’re at a shift in this essay, what’s sometimes called “the turn” in academic writing, and the turn is this:

As things began to fire up, I suddenly had NO free time. I barely had time to eat and sleep. This is still true, by the way, but here I am penning this (way too long???) navel-gaze of an essay because I want to make a point (I swear I’m about to get to the point). Here’s the point:

The reason I could carry out this entire mission to help women find good men?

It’s because I haven’t had to deal with one. I didn’t have to come home and cook dinner or fold laundry or provide free therapy or free life-coaching or fill the gap in some man’s friendless existence. There’s been no ESPN blaring in the background to drown out my thoughts, no ego that needed massaging, NO DRAMA (🤣) to distract me from my goals.

😂

I mean some of that as a joke (#not_all_men and all that), but also not a joke. For the past 2.5 years, my time has been almost exclusively my own, and this is where we get back to Virginia Woolf.

I went from having “a room of my own” that I VERY MUCH DID NOT WANT—I hated the emptiness of it, the silence—to NEEDING that room—that space and silence—more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life. And I was grateful for it.

I’m grateful for it now. It has been an absolute gift.

I don’t want to stay here forever. I want to be needed, to be part of a household again. And I’m working on that (finally. I promise I am). I’m tired of handling everything on my own, of not having a partner to hash out life’s quandaries, of lacking that check-and-balance that solid couples have. I’m also tired of trying to open the spaghetti sauce jar by myself.

It’s time for another “turn” in this essay now and another quote from Virginia Woolf:

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

If you’re here reading this, this quote is now about you, it’s about “us.” It’s presumptuous to call Burned Haystack a “masterpiece,” so that’s not what I’m doing, but I do want to end this celebration of singlehood by pointing out that it was my very-much-unwanted aloneness that led to the creation of the most amazing and beautiful community of which I’ve ever been a member.

The quote references “the single voice,” but that voice isn’t mine anymore: it’s OURS, and it’s powerful, and it’s changing things. I am grateful for every single one of your voices, and I’m grateful that my “long-term, low-commitment, casual boyfriend” (shoutout to the Barbie movie! 🔥) gave me the opportunity to spend this time in solitude, in singlehood, and that it ended up paving a path to the most actively “together” experience of my life, with all of you.

All “singlehood” means is that there’s not a designated man. Who cares. Whatever you’re doing or not doing today, please take a moment to just celebrate yourself, your own “singlehood,” in a way that champions rather than laments it. Men come and go, but YOU are forever. ❤️🥰🔥