I recently moved to Seattle and signed a lease for a 1 bedroom / 1 bathroom apartment in the north part of town. This is my first time living alone. When I would tell people of my plan back in Chicago they would always ask me how I felt about it. How would I do? Would I feel lonely? ‘No, I don’t think I will be lonely,’ I responded. I like to think that I do pretty well alone. I enjoy my own company. I have eaten at restaurants and gone to movies by myself before and had a great time. I did a solo road trip from Chicago to Seattle and absolutely loved it.
One challenge that living alone did bring forth, however, is the project of furnishing it. It is a challenge to me because it is something that I don’t have a lot of practice doing. I have lived in apartments before, but always with roommates. Sharing the space allowed me to not have to make very many decisions about how the apartment should look or feel. Not to say that any past roommate would ignore my stated preferences — I just never stated any preferences to begin with. Or if they asked me what I thought about a specific addition, I would defer to their choice.
I had this view that all that apartment furnishing stuff was so pointless. It felt temporary to me. ‘It is just a couch. It is just art on the wall. It doesn’t matter because we are going to be moving in a year or two anyways,’ I would tell myself. A couch is for sitting, and a wall is for structural support and privacy. Nothing more. So why do I need to bother going through aisle after aisle in furniture stores trying to find the right thing to hang? Time is better spent on other things. I thought I had ascended to a higher level of understanding and saw through the lies that all these home decor stores were selling.
And I don’t know maybe I was right. I guess I did save time and mental energy to go on my phone more or whatever. But the thing is that time came at a price. It came at the price of me not feeling very connected to the space in which I was living. How could I ever, though, with the attitude I had? The space didn’t feel like mine. Of course it was never all mine, but it wasn’t even mine a little bit. My belongings were there, but that was the extent of it. There were my clothes in the bedroom dresser, and my Tupperware in the Tupperware cabinet, but I came to realize that was not enough to make an apartment that you rent into your home.
Your home is supposed to be a place of warmth and comfort. An environment that invites you in and encourages you to relax. But when I would come back to the apartment, I would sit on a couch that I did not really care for, and put my legs up on a coffee table that did not fit the rest of the aesthetic. And now that I thought about it, the rug pattern didn’t really look that good. My air of “not caring” had led me to live in a space that I felt alien in.
Transitions
I left a lot in Illinois. I left the place that I spent the majority of my life in. I left the geographical proximity to my family. I left years of memories, both good ones and bad ones. I left people who meant a great deal to me.
Now it is time to make a new life, though, and I did not want that same feeling of distance with the place that I am living in to take root in Seattle as well. The tradeoff of more phone time with that feeling of disconnection was not something I was willing to make anymore.
So I decided to change my attitude when it came to furnishing my new apartment. I tried to think about filling the space, so it wouldn’t feel like I was just existing there. Or rather, not even just filling the space, but curating it. I use the term curation because it implies an air of agency, of intention. And that was what I was missing all those years. I want to bring pieces and art into my apartment on purpose, so that I can make it my home. Instead of thinking of each decision I had to make about the couch, the dining table, the mattress, the bed frame, the rugs, the desk, the lamps, the dishes, the silverware, as a burden, I instead thought about each of these decisions as an opportunity to invite warmth and joy into the space. Into my space.
For the first time I thought about color schemes and themes that stretched from room to room, throughout the whole home. I expanded my perspective and allowed myself to feel comfort. I actually spent more than 60 seconds picking out my hand soap dispenser. I looked for a color that I liked, and maybe I could even find a set of two: so I could have one next to the kitchen sink and one next to the bathroom sink. And I found something even better! I found a set 2 soap dispensers, a small tray for the dish sponge, a larger tray for the bathroom to place your lotions and whatnot on, and a toothbrush cup. All the same style and color. A deep forest green that I have come to love so much, and made out of a sturdy and stately ceramic. The joy I felt when I found that set was a unique one, and one that I have thought about since that moment.
I have come to realize that is the joy of bringing a vision to fruition, however small it may be. Of admitting to yourself that something small actually does matter, and then acting on it. Now, each time I use that hand soap dispenser, and when I place the dish sponge on its tray that matches, I am interacting with direct products of my intentionality. When I finish brushing my teeth, I place the toothbrush back in a cup that I picked out on purpose, because I liked the form and color of it. Those interactions are that much more enjoyable now.
Curation, to me, means giving your own thoughts and feelings legitimacy. It is acknowledging that your preferences and what makes you happy are important, and therefore worth spending time on. You have a way of thinking about your life, a vision for how you want to live, and those deserve to be realized. You can make those things happen.
The beauty is that this approach of intentionality spreads to other areas of my life as well. Bit by bit I am working on bringing into my life things that bring me joy. And each addition makes things that much better. The activities that I have taken more seriously, the hobbies that I have picked up, the friends I have grown closer to, the rebranding of this newsletter that you are reading, are all consequences of me deciding to put more thought into choosing my hand soap dispenser.