Growlery
a vocab word that sounds like what it means. Kinda. Also, Latibulate.
This word landed second place in the vocab voting the other week, so I thought I’d cover this one right away. Thanks again for your votes! I thought this one was pretty fun, too, and it makes me think of a bunch of concepts I’ve been (Zuko’s) Musing about recently, that relate to it. I’ve been trying to think about when have I needed one of these, if I have one now, where it might be, and whether a growlery changes, depending on situation and need. (I also love this little woodcutted character with its glass of wine, glowering at us over its shoulder in its big comfy chair.)
3rd Place Growleries
See what I did there? ‘Growlery’ was the 2nd place vote but is also a 3rd Place concept? Ahem. I’ll see myself out.
I was thinking a lot about the following question, when contemplating this word: Can a place be a ‘refuge or sanctuary’ when you’re not allowed to leave it? In other words, I wondered how growleries might have manifested in the lockdown part of the pandemic, or did they not? Was there a use for them then, or do we have more need of them now? Which of course makes one wonder if a growlery is as essential a space for a human, as, say, a private space, or a 3rd Place? When trapped in one place, what happens is that the 1st place (home), 2nd place (work), and 3rd Place (magical pub or other public gathering) get mushed all into one. Was there any room for growleries during this time? Or did all of our space turn into one? Then again, I notice that the words ‘refuge’ and ‘sanctuary’ seem to be important to the meaning of ‘growlery’ and I can’t imagine that, locked down, our spaces could have been called either of those things. A prison is not a refuge, though a cloister can be a sanctuary, I suppose.
Being isolated kills a person, but being unable to ever be alone makes a person insane. I don’t think this can only be intro/ambiverts—I have to think that even extroverts go crazy if they’re absolutely never ever alone. Or is that just my ambivert self talking? Chime in, you true extroverts (if indeed that’s even a thing) and tell me true. When doing some research on abusive partners for my memoir, I came across some stats that showed that during lockdown, domestic violence increased, and many abuse survivor terms like ‘gray-rock’ing came into mainstream knowledge and use. No growlery means no place to go to let off steam. No place to escape a raging roommate either. Speaking of escape:
Latibulate
Hey, what do you know? We’ve got a bonus word today! And I feel like this word is at least heavily related, if not directly connected, to our first one. It seems like maybe the intention is different: one is a self-soothing type thing for anger management, and the other is more of a panicked backing into a corner not to contemplate but to escape reality. But it seems to me that a growlery could potentially be a place one latibulates to, right?
During lockdown, I was holed up with my partner (and his kids half time) in the apartment previous to this one I’m living in now. The previous place was on the third floor, and had a long balcony onto which we had elaborate lounge chairs and a grill (back when those were allowed). I did so much grading and Zoom calling and other work out there on that balcony whenever it was even close to warm enough to do so that it really did feel like a sanctuary. And that courtyard area was so for many people in that complex, too:
One of the courtyard/parking lots of our apartment complex during strict lockdown time started blooming with regular gatherings like clockwork. This began with just a family or two (they looked like what we used to call a “pandemic pod”) taking their kids out for some fresh air and to run around a bit. This was in 2020 when all pubs and other 3rd places were closed, and school and work was nearly all from home. My partner would go to the grocery store, masked, once a week, and we still surface-washed all the items he found there. It was a paranoid, isolated time. Because of this, I used to do a lot of my work outside on the balcony in an elaborate porch chair. That first little pod used to come outside daily, around a happy hour time of day. Then more families and others began to join them, and more, and more. Till right at the end of the lockdown time of 2020, there was a populous daily block party in the parking lot below my balcony perch, replete with snacks, laughter, kids’ bike races, and adults playing pass-the-baby.
I keep asking my younger stepgoblin and partner, “Can you imagine if I’d been trapped alone in the Birdhouse during lockdown?” They both insist that would never have happened—they’d have come to rescue me no matter what. But so many people had this experience: I know several friends that lived alone during that time, without even dating anyone, and so their lockdown became something of a stint in solitary. I think it has affected all of our sanity, them in particular.
A Room of One’s Own
The living situation with my 1st husband (you know, the gaslighting narcissist I talk about in my memoir and adjacent work) was a very vertically shaped 1-bedroom loft condo, with the one bedroom under a sloping roof and looking down on the first floor over an open railing. We used what was the bedroom as an office instead, and put our futon bed in the attached open area right against the small windows. We removed the door to the office, since it was an open room anyway, and so this condo ended up wide open, with no inner doors that closed, except the bathroom. This home ended up covered in tall cat trees and a clutter of curiosities (owned by him, not me). We also had an Xbox in a valuable antique armoire that we dumpster-dove for and somehow carried into the place ourselves (okay so that’s a second inside door that was able to be closed). Said console helped keep the peace when things got very bad, but even if we’d had a good marriage, you can agree that it would have been impossible to have a healthy relationship with no way to go away for even a moment. Thank god we weren’t working from home at that time.
The area where this place was, too: the remote and tiny suburb of Gunbarrel, with a steep hill leading down to the grocery store (it wasn’t till I was moving out that a lovely little brewery popped up in that neighborhood), and nothing but vast open space otherwise. Flat prairie open space, too—no closed off areas there either. And a half-hour bus ride to town. Not even an outdoor corner in which to latibulate. Is this why I always spent extra time at Lazy Dog or Mountain Sun on my way home from Denver so often when living there? Heck yes. Maybe those pubs were my growlery?
When we agreed to get a divorce 15 years in to the marriage, I still lived there for another 3 years after that, because my finances were so dire. So there I was, even though we were no longer technically together, in that place where there was nowhere to hide. So when I write about the importance of The Birdhouse, understand just how big a deal that growlery and sanctuary was.
I lived back and forth from Birdhouse to Partner’s place for a few years, until 2022, when I moved in officially, just before I went off to Washington to do summer Shakespeare for a couple months.* I still don’t have an actual room of my own here (nor does my partner—we share the master bedroom) but his kids have rooms of their own, which oddly helps. And our bedroom door closes (and locks, which is nice for other reasons).
Since we both work largely from home, we’ve built work spaces in the living and dining room, but we are able to go elsewhere if needed for our mental health, work task security, etc. Places like the pub across the street, the Starbucks a little further down the street, or we can just take the bedroom over and shut the door.
It’s still a shared space, but there’s a lot more of my stuff around and a LOT more respect between us in this space. I feel wanted in this space—I don’t feel like a guest in my own home but a welcome part of the partnership and family. Plus, our relationship is SO much healthier than either of our previous marriages, by eons. We support each other, celebrate each other, lift each other up, and most importantly, every so often we negotiate time alone.
Like, actually alone. I’ll be out at a show till late at night and he’ll have his own space to put up some horror movies for his mental health growlery. Or he’ll be someplace far away for business travel and will percolate in a hotel, taking pictures of liminal spaces. Or I’ll go visit my friend JQM for the weekend.
This is HEALTHY! Never being able to be out of each other’s sight is BAD for the mental health and the relationship, and there’s nothing wring with saying, “I love you so very much, please leave for a while, yeah?” This needs to be normalized. And of course we’re that happy to see each other again after a moment of blessed alone time, too. It’s so good.
*When I was out doing the Shakespeare thing, I lived with my good friend from college, who was a director and actor in the same show. She, too, had a one-bedroom apartment and so I lived on her couch for the summer. It was a really comfy couch, actually, but you can imagine the lack of privacy there too. I had no growlery for my frustrations there, until I found Well80 as my regular pub, which helped immensely.
What’s your growlery? Now that you know what it is, do you think you have one? Can a growlery be a different place each time you need it? Can you share a growlery, or does the term refer to a true Room of One’s Own?