How Isolation Can Harm Creativity

Personal Perspective: Isolation can make you feel helpless. Here’s what to do about it.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

This week, I realized that I am lonely.

The loneliness did not come on all of a sudden. It crept in slowly—as friends moved away, as I quit a club that I’d been a part of for nearly a decade, and as I withdrew into my solitary work as a writer as deadlines came fast and hard.

As an author, I spend most of my work life working alone. Most of the time, I don’t mind at all. As Susan Sontag wrote, “One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.”

Whether we are authors, architects, or attorneys, solitude gives us time to contemplate and to listen to our imaginations.

But alone time and loneliness are not the same. Alone time can be generative. Loneliness is destructive.

Loneliness, Isolation, and Depression

Whether you work alone at home or in a busy office, you can feel lonely. And loneliness, as researchers know, can cause depression. Feeling lonely can become a self-reinforcing cycle, which causes a person to feel even more lonely—even isolated.

As I define it (from research and experience), isolation and loneliness are not the same. Isolation is far worse. Isolation is loneliness without hope.

Psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller and her fellow researcher psychologist Irene Stiver once wrote about the psychological damage that isolation can cause: “We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation.”

They write that isolation is “a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation.”

As I experienced over the past year or so, the path is short from alone, to lonely, to isolated.

Neurodiversity and Isolation

As I wrote in my recent book A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning with Mental Health and Higher Education, neurodiversity and isolation often go together because of the stigma our society holds against neurodivergent people.

Stigma, as I wrote, “creates negative stereotyping and isolation, typically based on irrational fear.” As a bipolar-autistic writer who shares my diagnosis publicly, I am acutely aware of the fear that it sparks in others when they hear my diagnoses.

Feeling that others fear you (if you have bipolar disorder), or that they don’t believe your problem is real (say, if you have anxiety or ADHD), leads to isolation because you do not trust others to treat you with kindness and respect.

After enough rejection because of who you are, you withdraw, and isolation follows.

Professional Isolation

I work from home, so therefore I’m rarely alone because of the presence of my family members. But their presence, as delightful as it is, does not solve isolation.

It is not the job of my kids to be my best friends, and it isn’t fair to ask my spouse to provide the level of support that a circle of friends and colleagues could.

You may spend your days in a workplace surrounded by people and still feel lonely because you are not supported professionally.

Whatever work you do, you need professional support and affirmation.

If you work alone, like I do, supportive colleagues can be hard to find, though, because there is little infrastructure in place for us.

Ernest Hemingway actually praised loneliness in his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.”

You might not know that Hemingway didn’t travel to Norway to deliver this speech. At the time he was depressed and chose to stay home, and the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden read the speech for him. Seven years later, Hemingway died by suicide brought on by years of depression.

Hemingway was wrong. Creative groups have helped careers of creative people, including writers, for centuries. Isolation, on the other hand causes tragedy. (Sylvia Plath’s isolation toward the end of her life comes quickly to mind.)

We need colleagues who get us. Who affirm us. Who reassure us that we are on a journey that matters and who help us when we struggle on that journey.

What We Can Do About Isolation

For me, I needed to first figure out what I was feeling. I’d been feeling low and having trouble sleeping. I felt unmotivated to work. I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what.

So, like I do when faced with puzzles I can’t solve, I described what I was feeling in my notebook until the answer became clear.

I figured out that I was lonely and also that I felt helpless to fix it. Loneliness plus helplessness meant I felt isolated. No wonder I was struggling.

If you are unsure about what you are feeling, here is what I suggest:

First, write about it to figure out how you feel. Sit down with a pen and paper or dictate into your writing software. Describe what it is you’re feeling. Disconnected? Unsupported? If so, how are those feelings affecting your professional or creative life?

Next: take affirmative steps reaching out to others. Schedule a coffee meetup one morning. If you have been feeling isolated, you may not want to do even this one small thing. That’s part of isolation’s power—making you feel helpless. So, do one small thing to prove to yourself that you aren’t.

Another idea: join a professional organization in your field or rejoin one whose membership you might have let lapse. (I did the second one.) Go to a conference. (Really.) At the conference, stay in the hotel with a roommate, instead of alone. (Yes, really.)

The first step is figuring out that you feel lonely. The second is realizing that you aren’t helpless. Both might seem really hard, but you can do both things.