the big move
Hello dear reader.
It has been a while, but in the time that has passed, your friend Me, moved into a new home. That’s right, we waved our white flag and said farewell to the rats that have taken over our once happy homestead.
Fortunately, we love our new house. Thanks for the push in the right direction, rats! It is on a quiet street, but still in the city. We no longer have our own stand-alone home, but we are on the second floor and have our own private our entrance. Even better, now we have a little yard, but we also have a screened-in porch, right off the kitchen!
It feels like a very grown-up apartment, there is a definite charm with the bonus of being able to spread out. We are still paying rent, so that fact remains the same, but we definitely upgraded a lot for a small increase in expenses. She is not quite ready for her big debut yet, but in the meantime, here are some little details from our new place.
This is our new rainbow rug. We have ground to cover, so we got a few new rugs to help soften sounds. This one lays in what will eventually be a dining room, but is now an activity room. I love her dearly and am very happy she is helping make this house a home.
This is the decor on the wall of my office. It is a collection that will soon be growing, but you are seeing Stage 1. Some of this art I created myself, the framed drawing in high school & the watercolor was sometime in the past few years. Can you guess which one is mine?? I figured the art would help me harness my creativity, while the portrait of Miranda Hobbs will help me find my inner Boss Bitch.
Simply a comfy, cozy, colorful living room. This is one little corner of the room, complete with a sequined pillow of Prison Mike that can be wiped to gold sequins and back again (Thanks for the lovely present Cooper Mae!). It’s a tactile corner, one for imagination and creativity. People have gotten some of their best ideas sitting there, they will eventually tell me later, I assume!
This one is simply so you can see the texture in our bathroom. Pretty neat right?
That’s all I can show you for right now, but perhaps once we have put everything in its rightful place I can show you more. I am sure you are salivating for more with these tasty little morsels I have bestowed upon you!!
While I am thankful that we are in a place we can see ourselves in long-term, it was quite the journey to get here. We had issues with our old house, but in my mind, they were all a fair trade for the fact that we had privacy and a space that was entirely ours. Things came to a head once we returned home after a Christmas stay at my parent’s house. The house turned on us, the rats in the attic felt emboldened by our absence, and it really felt like the house had submitted to their tyranny.
I will spare you all the gory details, but I will tell you this - it was bad enough that our landlord let us out of our lease early even after attempting several different avenues of defense. The rats claimed their space and they were not yielding.
As you can imagine, we were scrambling to find a new place to live. I was surfing craigslist ads every single day, multiple times a day. I was broadening my search to different areas and prices, but we were having so much trouble finding anything that felt like a match. We looked at 10 different places in 2 weeks but still didn’t find the right one. We were about to just sign up for another month at the Rat Palace, but, thankfully, we looked at our Current Apartment on the day of the decision. Luckily, things panned out for us and have now unfolded according to the way that we wanted.
Even though things were looking up for us, I spent the remainder of the month feeling stressed and anxious. I was worried about packing, hiring movers, what our new house would be like, would we really be going into a better situation. You know, your classic fears of the unknown. All of this pressure and anxiety I had in my body was spilling out onto everything - It exaggerated every other problem - things as small as not being able to find a hair tie to the state of our country and honestly the world at large. I was feeling angry and upset almost always, it was all bubbling under the surface ready to erupt with even the slightest provocation. It was hard for me to relax, to really enjoy whatever moment I was in. It made me worry about myself, worry in ways that I had not really ever felt before. The move was pushing things out that I was suppressing, and this was scary to me. It still is.
I will say that getting settled into my new routine has helped a lot. Our internet finally works, the furniture is in place where we like it, I have my clothes unpacked and organized. I am gaining headspace back where I no longer have to worry about packing up and heading somewhere new. I am also trying to manage my day to day stress a little better so that I am no longer feeling pinpricks of tears behind my eyes whenever something is hard or poignant. I am taking time to stretch during the day, I am getting back into reading books (not just articles), I am practicing Spanish. I am spending time doing the things that make me feel happy, that make me feel like I am making my life more positive and enriched.
I am going to keep an eye on my anger and dark thoughts, I am working on spinning them into golden threads that make me stronger and better. Hopeless is not a feeling I want to have, I want to keep moving forward. That’s the Big Move. The move that I will continually be making, so I suppose I better get used to it.