Updates

(I’ve started and deleted and restarted this post at least ten different ways.)

Since moving into this house, we’ve played musical rooms countless times. We move furniture and change paint colors, and just when we think something fits, our lives shift again. I appreciate our flexibility and hate the process. I feel like we have plenty of space but a completely impractical layout for almost any configuration of our family’s needs, and my frustration grows each time something requires us to change a space I like.

Our home office recently underwent such a change.

We knew we wanted a home office when we were looking for a new home. Ryan loved having one in the old house, until that became Dylan’s room, although he hardly ever slept there. When we moved in, he painted it dark green and moved in his oversized desk. I carved out my own space in it between built-in cabinets, though the shelf felt too high or too short or not big enough for what I wanted.

During one of our rounds of Change the Room, I took over the office. The kids were in school. I worked pretty steadily from home doing social media and content creation. I wanted to write more. Ryan drove to work each day, a typical but annoying commute in our suburban sprawl of a neighborhood. We agreed that I would use the space more than he would.

The deep green became my favorite shade of aqua, and I chose curtains with flowers, a rug with a pattern I liked more than anyone else.

Quickly, it became my favorite room in the house — and then things shifted again.

I joined the PTA and said yes and yes and yes to all sorts of things that pulled me away from my writing oasis. I published, then stalled, then spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I began to see the cracks in the social media work I was doing.

I got a part-time job at a preschool and kept saying yes to everything but my desk.

The pandemic began. We all worked from home, schooled from home, danced from home, karate-d from home, baked bread and played board games and laughed and annoyed the crap out of each other from home. I tried to write and journaled instead. Tried to write and meditated. Tried to write and ate chips and cried and wondered if we would ever leave the house again.

And I did.

But Ryan didn’t.

Though he goes into the office occasionally now, the great majority of his work is done from our house. For a while, he bounced between the couch and his oversized desk, which lived in the living room, and the kitchen table. Some days he would go in my office and close the door.

(You know where this is going.)

So, once again, the rooms in our house shifted like a kaleidoscope, and the office is his office once again.

The paint remains the same, absorbing the light in delicious ways in the late morning hours, but it’s no longer my space. My things don’t fill the shelves, and my hopes don’t get to live in air there any longer.

It makes sense, logically, but it feels heavy all the same. It feels, some days, that moving my desk through that door meant giving up the hope of writing. I wish I could say I’ve moved past that, that I’ve managed to make progress without a physical “room of one’s own.” Truthfully, though, I’m not sure I can say that. I’m not sure exactly where writing and I stand right now, and it feels like we’re circling each other, without anywhere to land, because of all the yeses I’ve allowed myself to say the last few years.

Saying no, though, is hard.

Instead, I’ll walk by the office and regret that it’s no longer mine.

I started November on a bit of a writing streak. I managed to sit my butt in a chair and write every day, posting here and making progress on a project I’d like to release by the end of the month. Then I did #OneDayHH and haven’t written here since.

I love participating in that particular social media challenge, both for the moments I capture and for following along with other participants. This year, I looked forward to gleaning a little more inspiration from the day. I wanted to see what I might turn over when looking at the day through my camera’s lens. (Ok, my phone’s camera’s lens, but you know what I mean!)

Not surprisingly, it did uncover a few things — and therein lies my current problem. I reacted so strongly to some of what I captured that I’m not sure what exactly to focus on writing right now. Part of the photo challenge is stepping outside your comfort zone when it comes to sharing. I understand that, cerebrally. My appreciation for writers and storytellers who can share with abandon grows greater each time I sit and think about sharing my own stuff.

I want to write about:

How I feel when I walk past my former home office

How I got through a day without a single photo of our cat

Why documenting a day made me miss small parts of last year

How it feels to see one of my true passions (writing) regulated to late moments, when my brain is more tired than my body — and my body is tired

(And now I want to write about why I can’t find the bullet point list in WordPress, even though I’ve been working in it for years and know I’ve bulleted plenty of things in the past.)

Basically, I have a lot to say about that single day, but it’s all wrapped up in emotions and worries and concerns I obviously haven’t completely faced since we’ve hit the ground running this fall. Instead of sitting and facing those things, I’ve done the opposite. Worked on a house project. Went to dinner with friends. Read a book. Started re-watching AHS: Coven.

None of those things on their own feel negative. But when they’re piled together in a mishmash of avoidance, it gives me pause. So here I am, after a few days off, trying to commit to unpacking those thoughts, one day at a time.