Home is where the…huh

My parents divorced when I was four, so I grew up in two figurative houses. Each of my parents, separately, moved on average every four years – possibly more, but that’s my best estimate. At my Dad’s house, I shared a room with my younger sister until I left for college.

Once I left for school in San Antonio, I no longer had a room at either parents’ house (due to my mother moving, and my sister occupying the former shared room), so summers and holidays were tricky. Plus I lived in a dorm, so I moved my possessions around every semester, in addition to those aforementioned breaks to Dallas.

So yeah, I have a weird relationship with the concept of “home”.

Even my first apartment(s) weren’t ones I chose for myself; I relied on my mother to help me scope out places and my final choices were based on her approval of the area’s safety and amenities.

So this new apartment of ours is great leap forward into constructing my life to my own vision. It’s come with a hefty price, though. To start, our utilities weren’t turned on in time, so we moved in all weekend in what was easily 100 degree (or 38 for my Celsius-based friends) heat.

Though now that I think about it, the price extraction started quite early on, with the sorting and purging of my apartment’s contents, which included three years’ worth of accumulated detritus as well as plenty of miscellaneous stuff I’d brought with me from four years of school.

Every time I look at a stack of papers from an old university class, I think of two things, Niecy Nash from Clean House (“mayhem and foolishness!”) and this passage from “The Artist’s Way”:

You probably won’t have time to complete all of the other tasks in any given week. Try to do about half. Know that the rest are there for use when you are able to get back to them. In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.

Truer words were never spoken, Julia Cameron! Shedding my accumulated ‘Stuff’ has been like a snake sloughing off its skin. It’s hard and emotional and makes me grumpy as hell, but it’s freeing in the best way imaginable.

Plus, definitely the best argument for asceticism is having to schlep your stuff down three flights of stairs and up two more in the Texas summer.