Settling House

After the jump, some settling-in navelgazery!



I'm really fond of my living space back here in Chicago. Its location is a big part of that - being a comically short walk from a handful of close friends, and easily connected to many more on foot or via CTA - but it's been a real joy to settle in. Some of the nicest things I heard during my Muppet party were pals saying that the place felt more settled than the two months I've been here... which makes sense, given how nest-ready I was by the time I landed.

Like any affordable Chicago apartment, it has its quirks and its compromises. Having this much space at this price meant a lot of heavy-duty cleaning on move-in, as the previous tenant had possibly never cleaned. (There were lighting fixtures that I thought were tan, which I subsequently learned were actually white,  for instance.) The lack of a dishwasher would have bothered me a lot a few years ago, but after nearly a year living abroad over the last two, the daily routine of washing-as-you-go doesn't feel too cumbersome, even after entertaining. The basement storage is pret-ty... what's the word? Grody? But on the other hand, there's basement storage. The (large) kitchen had almost no working surfaces, necessitating the pickup of a few cabinets and islands. There's an occasional waft of funk from the pipes. But it's all come together really nicely, and I've met it halfway. Whether it'll be a long-haul home has yet to be determined (longish commute and some of those compromises need to be felt out over a full year) but for now, I am wild with delight to call it home.

There's also the matter of settling-in emotionally, which is its own process. It (re?)occurred to me today that the past few years have been a lot. Marriage into cohabitating into comps into career anxiety into relationship anxiety into divorce into a kind of on-the-go freefall/sprint with occasional reprises of career anxiety... I'm lucky that my travels gave me a lot of solo time to sift through my feelings and reckon with all of that. And I think that I've done right by partners in being careful not to use relationships to gloss over my own stuff. But there's still stuff that shakes loose at odd times. It feels like those moments when you hammer a picture hanger into the wall and hear pebbles and debris coming loose on the other side of the drywall, careening out of their suspension.

This can take a lot of forms and come from a lot of places. Sometimes it's a simple, dumb thing: a friend cancels a coffee date, and a weird cluster of abandonment/insecurity issues skitter off the rooftop. Sometimes it's something more: a relationship gets serious quickly and a reluctance to repeat old behaviors bubbles up from the sink. Sometimes it's those universal things: a holiday comes along and old unresolved memories get hard to scrape off the windows. And while a lot of these are relationship-oriented, there's a lot of career-anxiety and imposter-syndrome odd-ballery snaked into the wiring too, which have their own triggers and manifestations.

Where I'm glad in this is that I've got more tools to recognize, identify, and talk through these things now, and that I'm getting better at stepping away from the avoidance techniques I picked up somewhere along the way. Cutting out most social media helps to avoid papering over things with distractions, and walking away from my phone and/or laptop entirely becomes an incredibly useful every-so-often deep-cleaning of sorts. Maybe there are people out there who roll their eyes at the idea of mindfulness walks, but a tech-free mindfulness walk can often get me right to the heart of what's happening, and (sometimes) through it to a better place. Sometimes, of course, all there is to do is to identify the Thing, point at it, and say "that made me sad." But it is infinitely better to point and name than to frantically avoid and deflect.

And finally, it's helpful - when I can remember it - that no home is without its quirks, compromises, and flaws, that there's no perfect state for things to be restored to. And just as I believe (ardently, insistently) that every relationship has the same weird corners and odd layouts, and that there's some happy medium of fixing what you can and making peace with what is-the-way-it-is (and that rushing to quick-fixes or slapping endless coats of paint over things is a good way to turn your life into a money pit... metaphorically? I don't know), I'm trying to have patience with myself and accept the same things. That some days I'll just be sad. That some days I'll be angry about things that happened years ago. That some days I'll wonder whether I want to be doing the work I'm doing.

Because another day, I know, I'll be giddy over something infinitely smaller and dumber than these things (yesterday it was blueberry jam in case you were curious), because more and more of my life is feeling stable and purposeful than has been true for some time, and because I'm blessed with people in my life who understand the weird compromises you make to get a 1-bedroom for under a grand in my old Chicago neighborhood (metaphorically and also literally). And while the house is still settling, I'm getting better at taking it as it is, being in the moment, and staying excited about what lies ahead.