Permission to Disappear

St James Walkway. Photograph. 2022.

Weekly trips to the library were a childhood staple. The adult section was on the ground floor; the children's occupied the entire upper floor. No lift that I recall — only an open, sweeping staircase that felt modern. While my mother browsed downstairs, my sisters and I were set loose above. The only rule I imposed on myself was that if I opened a book, I had to sound out enough words to make some sense of the story. Beyond that, the shelves were ours. Later, with a sense of hopeful maturity, we dared the young adult section.

I was with Mary Lennox as she found her secret garden and walked its mossy paths. I followed Katy Carr as she plotted her next adventure and lost myself in Anne Shirley's enthusiasm on Prince Edward Island.

The library taught me that to disappear was not an act of avoidance but a skill to be cultivated.

Bruno Bettelheim argued that fairy tales carry therapeutic weight precisely because they move beyond the literal. Their strangeness offers distance from what is feared. An imaginary forest is safer to enter than a real one. I still lean on those old stories to understand the present — and I notice that the work I make now is built the same way: a room that is not quite a room, a woman who is not quite visible, a threat arriving through a window.

In a world of timesheets and billables and forty open tabs, slowing down is rarely rewarded. But my best thinking arrives while I am vacuuming.

I have been slow to notice what that means. I make work about house dust. I have collected it from other people's homes, suspended it in water, and photographed it at a scale you cannot look away from. I have made ten collages about domestic labour and called them Household Work. And the imaginative life I have spent this essay defending — the disappearing, the wandering, the recalibration — arrives to me while I am pushing a vacuum cleaner across a floor.

The everyday is not the thing I escape. It is the thing I go into.

With a holiday on the horizon, I feel the familiar pull toward the library. Some of it is nostalgia. Mostly it is a yearning for mental space — a place where thoughts drift, rearrange themselves, and return quietly changed.