Shell Evacuation

Like most millennials, I have been (1) conditioned by my family to prioritize security and (2) conditioned by society to please myself only when it doesn't displease others. I have “Do NOT rock the boat” tattooed on the inside of my brain. This is an important backdrop to the events of Summer 2020, when my life, like many others’, was a flat line with very few bumps. My bumps were: applying to Counseling Psychology PhD programs and living with a domineering, incessantly social roommate.

From June until December, I spent my days working my 9-5, my early mornings and nights studying for the GRE or writing personal statements, and my sleeping hours trying not to wake up to my roommate coming home drunk and/or having loud FaceTime conversations outside my bedroom door. I dodged food spills on my couch, Taylor Swift blasting in common spaces (the same five songs on repeat), and Covid scares - which could always be traced back to my roommate’s incessant socializing - around the clock.

When I submitted my last application on December 15th, I stuck my head up for air. My roommate was home in San Francisco for the holidays. She was coming back to New York on December 28th and then turning right around on the 30th to spend New Year’s weekend in Rhode Island, the state with one of the highest Covid infection rates in the U.S. at the time. Also, she would be there with 4 friends, each of whom had also just flown back from their family homes after Christmas.

I realized what I was too busy to realize for 6 months: that I felt unsafe in my home. That it didn’t actually feel like my home at all - it felt like my roommate’s home that I was borrowing, a guest. I realized how squashed I was, how small I had been playing. Finishing out the 12 month lease may have been tolerable in a life that contained a commute and events and dinners and movement, but the stillness of the pandemic demanded that I share my most intimate space with someone who made me feel intimately safe. My whole body knew something incredibly inconvenient: I couldn’t stay.

I did what anyone would do: I got a Tarot reading about it. My reader told me to have a face to face conversation with my roommate when she returned in hopes that she would agree to a sublet, so I did. Here are three things my roommate said that summarize the conversation well:

1. “I don’t want a sublet, because I don’t want to widen my covid risk. At least with you, we have a couple of friends in common.”
2. “I’ll commit to not going to any parties, but I won’t limit the number of friends I see. That’s like ranking my friends, and that’s not cool.”
3. “I’m here in New York to socialize, so we’re going to have to figure something out.”

I left my apartment an hour later, walked to my boyfriend's to vent, and never came home. I decided to stay with him for a week or two while I decided how to handle the situation. I called upon a second divination tool this time: an energy reading with my spirit guides, who told me I definitely needed to move out. They told me to - every morning and every night for 21 days - ask them out loud for exactly what kind of apartment I wanted. They told me that I’d find it, and once I found it, the fact that I had a lease elsewhere would resolve itself.

Fast forward 21 days + a couple weeks of looking, and I found a huge studio with 13-foot ceilings, a staircase up to a lofted bedroom, two floor-to-ceiling windows, 5 closets, and my own 60-square-foot balcony. In downtown Manhattan. In my price range. Around the same time, the value of the cryptocurrency I bought in 2016 was buoying. Although it made me sick to my stomach to pay two rents, I felt stuck. My body clenched every time I thought about going back to my apartment or fighting the battle for a sublet, and my boyfriend had not signed up for a long-term roommate. Anyway, something in my gut was tugging me towards my own place. As much as the practicalities weren’t ideal, the crypto made it doable, and sometimes all you have are imperfect options. I decided to pay the last few months of rent at my old apartment with crypto and moved in.

I was so preoccupied with getting to the new apartment that I had put zero thought into what would happen once I was in it. I knew that I wanted to feel safer, bigger, inspired-er, but I had no plan for how to make it happen. I had always had roommates / lived in microscopic apartments, so I had hardly any furniture to my name. And I had never taken decorating seriously before, so I had no idea what aesthetic made me feel good. I started shopping and learned that the price of each piece of furniture was about the same as the number of options for each piece of furniture. It didn’t feel like “me” to spend a ton of money on decorating an apartment, but it also didn’t feel like “me” to live in an apartment that wasn’t one hundred percent “me.” You know? I was completely overwhelmed by what felt like another battleground rather than the refuge I expected. As my friend Emily texted, “You were just like hello cute apartment my cute self is here now so we need to be friends. And then the apartment is like you need to fill me with furniture and until you do I’m playing hard to get.”

I wish I could say the apartment danced to life, but it didn’t. I’ve been living here for 3.5 months now and it’s still not fully a home. I’ve bought 4 big-ticket items that I’ve returned or resold. I’ve stayed up until 4 in the morning and panic-bought a foam stool (???). I’ve completed multiple buying sprees, thinking each one was the last, just to find out that backorders were extended for months or the items were never coming at all (cough cough Etsy).

So no, it did not dance to life. But eventually, I realized, it began to dance me to life. The universe handed me more floor and more wall than I knew how to fill, but the process of learning how transformed me from the outside in.

First it was the furniture. It felt indulgent to buy a couch, and an accent chair, and barstools all for myself - but I couldn’t live in an empty apartment. So I bought them, and I became someone who deserved a couch, and an accent chair, and barstools all for myself. I took up more space.

Then it was the projects. I didn’t trust that I could pull off DIYs and handywoman tasks, but I actually… did. I tore down the sconces that came with the place, patched up the walls, and painted over them. I learned that tools are actually kind of intuitive, that I can install an aerator in both my sinks (even the hard one), and that I can cut rolls of fake grass from Home Depot to the size of my balcony walls and staple them to cover the ugly Blueskin lining. (And now my balcony looks swanky as hell.) I became confident that I could just figure things out.

Then it was the styling. It felt impossible to choose exactly how to fill the space to make it feel… what? Safe, playful, a place that honors nature and my creativity. How to create such a place from an infinite number of options? I Pinterested, and I followed my gut instead of my mind. I trialed and error-ed. And with each choice, my values, the visual expression of who I am, and the things I needed to feel safe all came into focus. Suddenly I knew myself better. I grew more defined.

I am still creating my home, and I am learning so much - like the difference between the pieces that make me look exciting (to visitors, social media, myself), and the pieces that make me feel excited. I’m learning the difference between buying something out of compulsion to cross it off the list, and buying something because all of my energy is behind it, swirling around it, saying “yes, this is the one.”

I am learning that my style is a cross between natural textures and bright colors and exaggerated silhouettes, a surrealist Salvador Dali beach seen through a kaleidoscope. I’m learning that of course it’s hard to find exactly what I’m looking for on Pinterest - it’s mine.

And I am learning that to create a home is to express something sacred: exactly what you need around you to feel intimately comfortable. It’s a process of self-discovery and self-expansion. To look around and see yourself in each thing, in all these things that take up space - it’s impossible not to stand up straighter.

The universe handed me more floor and more wall than I knew how to fill. It knew that I would grow into it, like a hermit crab who left behind its evacuated shell, growing into its new one. I carry my bigger presence around my life with me - confident that I am capable, more sure about who I am, and taking up the space I deserve to. I am home.