I arrived at Domaine Valent on the last day of July. The day was hot, the train ride from Paris long, my luggage heavy, and I had barely slept the night before. Walking into my spacious, cool room on the ground floor of that beautiful French countryside house helped me reconnect the various circuits in my brain, only to realise that I had landed in the middle of nowhere. We weren’t even in a village; we were “out there”, literally on top of a hill. At that point, I hadn’t even begun to think about a digital detox. My brain went straight into panic mode: What am I going to do here for eight whole days? Two, maybe three, I could handle, but eight? I eat pavement for breakfast, lunch and dinner; I love my city life. That’s who I am. On top of that, I hadn’t properly slowed down in over two years, with constant work, travel, communication, and socialising piling onto my never-ending to-do list. I had chosen this retreat in early August precisely because it was the only time of year when I could afford to completely switch off, not even check email – the one period when nobody was going to look for me, or at least when not finding me wouldn’t lead to any catastrophic consequences for anyone, my inner melodrama went on. All my rational plans for building a brand new space for my expressive freedom went down the drain once I was confronted with the simple spaciousness of the French countryside. I was convinced I’d die of boredom, if not of panicked claustrophobia, by the end of Day 3. I asked the two writers who had already been at the Domaine for a week how they were coping, and they seemed unusually calm about the isolation they had chosen to subject themselves to, especially given that both were from New York City. Even more surprisingly, their faces glowed with excitement at having had all this time and space for their creative pursuits. This was my first clue that something important, if not mysterious, was going to happen to me in this silent summer of 2025.

Amory had advised us before arriving not to look at our phones until lunchtime, and to let family and friends know that we’d be less responsive that week. Being the good student I always was, I decided to follow her advice, somewhat unsettled by it, but far more curious to see why she found it so crucial. The truth was, I knew very little about my own writing process beyond forcing myself to sit down and write due to looming deadlines. And there was something about Amory’s unassuming confidence in the writing process, combined with the general atmosphere of creative productivity at the Domaine, that made me feel her advice could be good for me. So I let go of clinging to the outside world. It was only going to be a week, after all.

As soon as I made peace with that decision, I began noticing how everything at Domaine Valent teemed with life: the cats, the sound of the wind moving through the leaves of the giant trees surrounding the house, the way the sky spoke to me as I lay in the hammock that became my main place of inspiration, the taste of fresh verbena tea each evening as red, then purple dusk slowly gave way to darkness around 10 p.m. These little rituals started naturally replacing my compulsion to check my phone, until I developed a near aversion to it. There were moments when I had to exchange a few messages with the outside world, but they felt so unnatural, like I had to do something toxic in an otherwise organic rhythm of my slow days in the countryside.

Letting go of my need to stay connected also revealed deeper layers of my digital addiction to the external world. I realised I was worried about my book contract, whether I could deliver what I’d promised at a level that merited the trust some very prominent academics had placed on my project. Would I have anything interesting to say for Cambridge University Press, and would anyone even care? I was saddened by the feeling that the natural flow of my academic voice had eroded over the years, contorted by harsh peer-to-peer feedback and repeated misunderstandings and pushbacks as I tried to explore socio-economic phenomena outside the canon.

Conversations with Amory about the creative process and academic writing made me wonder why academics so often associate writing with torture rather than pleasure, and why I too had lost joy in it. But as I settled into my body’s natural rhythm at the Domaine, bursts of writing began coming to me spontaneously. I experimented with different voices and styles, but one thing I wasn’t managing was accessing joy. Day 3 was especially grim: I woke up hating the world, questioning the point of anything I was writing, and angry with myself for not being able to feel joy. Finally, I told myself: Take a break from the book project and do something that brings ease if not joy; release if not happiness. I ended up with a poem on my hands – a long, dark poem about the battle going on inside of me, as the desire for joy and the heavy bits of my darkness collided and declared irreconcilable differences within my psyche.

Confronting that darkness through poetry turned out to be cathartic. Allowing for a spontaneous expression of creativity away from my “official” reason for being at the retreat gave me the possibility to hear not only the voices I thought I should hear, but also the odd ones — the ones that didn’t fit into how I wanted to think about my writing and my craft. And once I connected to those other voices that I had disowned, I managed to reconnect with my passion for research and academia. Because my passion is intimately tied to social injustice, to discrimination, to helping people see their own experiences of life as structurally conditioned, as not only as their fault. How could I ever write with conviction and passion if I had not gotten in touch with the heaviness that provided the necessary compost for these insights to emerge from the black box of my research process?

By the end of my stay, I realised that my addiction to the phone and constant connectedness to the digital sphere were a convenient way to avoid the deeper emotions and truths that gave my voice its power. And that by indulging that part of me at the expense of all others, I was reducing the power of my own presence in this world. After the retreat, I continue to indulge the digitally addicted self more than I’d like to admit (after all, I enjoy being connected to the world), but it is also much easier to find my way back to my voice when I need to write something, like this blog post, now that I have trimmed the weeds of hyperconnectedness inside my psyche. The task I’ve given myself for now is simply not to let them overgrow again.