sign of life
I’ve lived in my new place for a little over 40 days now and it feels like ground zero of all my anxiety. I have some upcoming events happening in a few weeks and having my apartment feel put together and settled sooner rather than later is of the utmost importance.
The only problem with accomplishing this is the fact that I am paralyzed by making interior design decisions. Hours are spent scrolling home design focused Instagram accounts, Pinterest, Apartment Therapy, and house tours on blogs like Cup of Joe for glimpses of inspiration. What I’m really looking for is a “plan.” Something that says, “Do x, y, and z, and you’ll have a beautiful, perfectly organized, and comfortable space.”
Given the crunch time I found myself in, I hired my friend Gunnar, an interior designer, to give me the elusive plan that I was searching for. He came over and we spent three hours talking about how the space should function, what we wanted to spend money on, what of our existing stuff we wanted to utilize, and what felt like nice-to-haves if we could swing it in our budget. The next day he sent me a powerpoint with mood boards reflecting what we talked about and an excel doc with products, links, and prices. All I had to do was click “buy” to bring this apartment to life in the way that we discussed. Well, that’s not all that I had to do, but it was the biggest mental and emotional hurdle that I had to cross.
Our space is coming together and it’s nothing like I imagined it would look like when I was scouring the internet for inspiration. It’s colorful, practical, cozy, cohesive, and above all, it feels like a home that reflects a lived life. That was the biggest thing I kept coming back to when I searched home inspiration - none of what’s popular or rises to the top in search results feel like anyone lives there. It all very curated and made for viewing, and really, made to make you buy shit you don’t need.
I realize that some people don’t think about how their house looks as much as it seems like I do, but the way Instagram makes people feel bad about their bodies is how it makes me feel about my home: it should be beautiful, appear effortless, and be in the perfect form. Essentially, it’s unattainable.
wrote a post about this a few weeks ago called The Optimization Sinkhole, and a quote she included from keeps ringing in my ear:“One under-appreciated consequence of believing there is such a thing as the ‘one best way’ in every aspect of life is subsequently living with the unyielding pressure to discover it and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it,” Sacacas writes. “And not only frustration. It produces anxiety, fear, compulsiveness, resignation, and, ultimately, self-loathing. If there is “one best way,” how will I know it? If I have not found it, have I failed? And is it my fault?”
This is exactly how I felt trying to make our space come together. I would source ideas and attempt to conceive a plan, but I was paralyzed with asking myself, “Is this the best approach? Could it be better somehow?” and then I’d close my laptop in defeat.
And then shortly after reading Anne’s piece, I read
’s piece called Instagram Store Core which really articulated the problem I was running into when looking for design inspiration:You know what it looks like, even if you don’t know what it is: bright yet non-aggressive colors, shiny plastics, checkerboard rugs, wannabe-Matisse prints. It’s playful without being childish, loud without being offensive, mismatched while being unified. It’s avant-basic mixed with Scandinavian design mixed with a touch of the Memphis School, and it’s the interior decorating style-du-jour of the internet.
Most of the individual items that fill these rooms are nice and well-designed. They aren’t garish or even in particularly bad taste. But there is something, some aura evoked when this specific combination of products and styles fills a room, that can only be considered in its entirety. Perhaps the best word is soulless—the same type of soullessness of Blank Street coffee and Florence Given and university mental health awareness posters—or better yet, impotent.
Today’s popular interior design styles lack an element of aliveness, as if generated by AI (and honestly, some of it probably is). Most of what I came across felt unattainable and mostly, unlived in. And maybe I’m so tangled in it because my external presentation of self has always had an underlying need to project a put together, sanitized, and respectable front (As fucked up as that is, it’s my reality and trauma, and if I could send white supremacy my therapy bill, I WOULD).
So maybe that’s really what’s at work here. An invitation to let my surroundings show up in a way that represents the fullness of my life, my shared life with my husband, and all the intricacies of making a blank space a home that can’t be captured via some images on the Internet. Something like that.
Maybe there’s a home tour in an upcoming letter to keep myself accountable.
Hold me to it.
Get this week’s playlist here.
Have a great week, friends. If you feel inclined to share, I’d love to know what the most “you” part of your home is - reply and let me know. <3
Meghan