I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.
The Irish painter John Yeats described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person... I and the other artists and writers I've known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done.
Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.