What a difference some paint (and curtains and furniture, etc. etc.) makes.
Before
A room in the basement, framed decades ago in plywood, with scattered boxes from our move and a desk left by the previous owner.
After
After priming, painting, putting in carpet tiles (thank you, D!), and obsessively hunting down curtains, furniture, felt tiles, wall art (including stuff that hasn’t seen a wall for years), etc., I have an office, a den, a place to leave the world behind.
Forgive me friends, corresponders, readers, the far-flung and the nearby. I have been distracted by my distractions. The month of May was a strangely busy one, with concerts, (They Might Be Giants, Robyn Hitchcock), a play (Macbeth at Fort Point), an author talk (Alison Bechdel), and an art exhibit (Ruth Asawa). Such a month would have been unlikely even in the days of youth when I buzzed with an internal combustion engine fueled by nights of restful sleep and the endless unspooling of time. While lovely, it was a bit exhausting for the older, more sleep-deprived and cynical me to be gallivanting here and standing for hours there. Add in my office project, a lovely obsession to outfit the first real private space I’ve had since I lived alone a quarter of a century ago, and I have been heartily elsewhere.
I write this from the vantage of the above after photo, sitting on a futon on the floor (a frame arrives by early next month), my feet resting on a chunky woolen area rug. Yes, I am in a basement with funky walls and an improvised door. True, it is dark, with most of the light provided by LED strips. I also have a window with a view onto our backyard, where finches and chickadees gather, crows dip tortilla chips into the birdbath, hummingbirds hover over the fuchsia, and an occasional dog or human peers at me inside my cozy cocoon. I am a lucky duck with a room completely of my own.
The goal is to have a place to do the things I can’t easily do in a shared space. Some of this is related to psychotherapy—virtual sessions, note and report-writing, accounting. The rest will be writing, being creative, trying to enter myself again. I want to write that tentatively, qualify it with “I hope.” However, it is time to reenter the discomfort, to force my hand, to become vulnerable again.