A room of my own | Humdrum 53
So I'm moving again. Two years ago I moved into this apartment, and then two years before that I lived in yet a different place. With each new job has come more money and security and nicer and bigger apartments. And finally now I will finally, finally live in apartment where I get my own office. With a door.
In the ten years I've lived with my partner, I've not truly had that room of my own. Instead I've carved out nooks for myself where a table big enough to accommodate groups of four, six, eight plus a hot meal and lots of good wine could have been.
My partner always got the room with the door. He's a slob and I weighed the frustration of not having my own space with the frustration of his stuff spilling all over the apartment without four walls to contain it. The latter I thought would take the greatest toll on our relationship and my sanity so there wasn't even an argument over who got to have the office.
But still there has been a toll: both my writing job and my pays-me-actual-money job require long stretches of time to think. And when I'm in deep think mode I need quiet. I usually can't listen to music, unless maybe instrumental. Someone else's words, even sung, are too distracting when I need to concentrate on finding my own. It's like I grow extra sound sensitive: anything too loud invades the whir that's already in my head, making it all the more difficult to find The Thing I Want to Say.
My current "office" is a strip of the living room, with my tiny IKEA desk pushed up against the windows. There is no hiding. My partner thumping around, eating, even breathing from the couch three feet away from my desk feels like an invasion. In order to fake a space of my own, we had to agree on when he could/could not be in the living room, that he couldn't even talk to me during certain times of the day unless he or the dog was bleeding.
So we decided this year we would find an apartment with an office for me too. But my excitement over getting my own space dwindled when I realized the time suck of looking for a new place and the packing and unpacking nightmare that comes with it.
I tried to do a cost-benefits analysis of moving vs. staying. But the analysis kept shifting based on new inputs: finding so few apartments in our with three rooms, in our budget, that would accept our small dog, against that never fully relaxed feeling of being at my desk and still feeling exposed and too accessible to let my mind run free against the fact that I've been writing less, and thus demanding less time of the living room, against the fact that I have a new, more demanding day job that's making time for moving more stressful and also partially the cause of less writing.
Overwhelmed, I was ready to say "fuck it's, let's not move" when my partner reminded me that I was miserable without my own space. If we weren't gonna move now, we'd want to next year and this mind fuck would start all over again.
"Let's get a place we can stay in for a few years," he said.
So after a spastic, sleepless week, we found one. I found it online, but he's the one who's seen it in-person. He thoughtfully took a video walking through this apartment with two huge bedrooms and a sunroom/office, a dining room, a living room and two full baths. An in-unit washer-dryer. A private balcony.
I didn't need to see this place in person. His enthusiasm was enough.
"Let's do it," I said.
And so we're doing it. Lease signed, checks sent to the new landlord. I'm anxious already about the packing and the moving and changing my addresses on all of the damn things. But I will have my own office. It has a lot of windows. And a door.
Reading + Watching
Sex Education (so good!) and Russian Doll (so weird!) on Netflix. Creative Nonfiction magazine for my brain and writing inspiration and A Gentleman in the Street for my romance novel fix.
About This Newsletter
Humdrum is written by Christina Brandon. She's fantasizing about buying new furniture and is debating the pros and cons of an orange couch. You can purchase her memoir, Failing Better, through Amazon. Connect with her by replying to this email or jumping on Twitter or Instagram. And tell friends to subscribe!