Joan Didion | A Reflection on Leaving, Stillness, and the Truth That Finds Us by Lamplight
Redefining Creativity
Her essay “Goodbye to All That” hit like a tuning fork when I left New York. That piece wasn’t just about leaving a city—it was about knowing, intuitively, that the pace we once moved at is no longer the rhythm life requires. We all have left certain places, at certain times. The places we once called home, the chapters we’ve outgrown.
Joan Didion’s legacy reminds us that truth lives in stillness. That writing—and by extension, living—requires a kind of radical quiet. And that there is no shame in leaving behind what no longer fits, even if the world once praised it.
Creativity often reshapes itself in new spaces. Sometimes it bends and shifts in motherhood—transforming us into something new. Sometimes it evolves with the changing forms of technology, generations, or radical insight.
Our hope is that through stillness and light, you find creativity that is true to your form, to your life, and to your current chapter.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” — Joan Didion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” — Goodbye to All That
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” — Goodbye to All That
Ritual & Meaning Everyday
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion reflects on the significance of everyday rituals—how they ground us, provide meaning, and offer a sense of preparedness and control amid uncertainty.
She writes of domestic symbols of care and readiness, such as hurricane lamps, clean sheets, and stocked food and water:
“Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way… These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
The hurricane lamps Didion mentions weren’t just functional—they were talismans of comfort and survival. In Southern California, where frequent power outages caused by Santa Ana winds were common, Didion and her husband owned dozens of these lamps, lighting their way through the dark.