Gut-wrenching Redecorating

It didn’t seem like it should have bothered me at all yet there I was forcing back tears, telling myself to breathe, feeling a rush of emotions erupt while my husband and David stood in the doorway watching. “What can we do? How can we help?” They knew the right things to say. I knew there was nothing they could do. Everything I was feeling ran deeper than a surface fix. Embarrassed, not knowing why I was reacting the way I was, I asked to be left alone. I needed to figure out why the simple act of rearranging furniture had caused me so much anxiety.

My writing room has been my sanctuary for years. When the kids were little and I needed space I’d disappear to write while Eric entertained. It’s the room where I created MYSTIC, ELLE & BUDDY, two young adult manuscripts, and over five hundred blog posts. There are letters and artwork from students on the walls, a small meditation area, my grandmother’s secretary desk, a bookshelf with my favorite children’s books, and a bed that was really an extended desk. The room had been the same for over ten years. The walls white and the carpet old. We’ve talked about redecorating for a long time. It was a “someday” project. I thought the reason I hadn’t gotten around to redecorating was time. I was wrong.

All the boys did was move the bed from my writing room to another room. Simple. Except, everything that was on the bed was now in piles on the floor, and all the storage bins that were under the bed had nowhere to hide. Inside the storage bins were old pictures, the kid’s trophies and Odyssey Of The Mind materials from when Eric and I spent our weekends coaching fifth graders. There it sat no longer hidden in darkness. I had to go through the bins to decide what to keep and what to toss. Next, I’d have to go through the closet and all the drawers that held baby books, journals, my grandmother’s photo albums. Not only would I have to face all the memories from my past I’d also have to decide what to hold onto and what to throw away. The mess I faced was not physical, but emotional.

What I really wanted was for someone to wave a magic wand and make my writing sanctuary beautiful because that would’ve been much easier than holding a picture from ten years ago and wondering how so much time had passed. Trying to move from one phase of life to the next is downright gut-wrenchingly messy. It takes time to adjust. It’s in that torturous mess that I’m forced to face the pain of change and of letting go. That’s what I’ve avoided in all the years of keeping my writing room the same, and I thought it was just lack of decorating skills. It goes much deeper. Once I’ve dug deep and gone through every drawer and every bin, then and only then will I be able to reimagine and rebuild.

Image supplied by Tim Goedhart
Tim Goedhart