One Room Living

I haven't had to confine all my personal belongings to one room since I was eighteen, because I moved out and enjoyed it thoroughly when I was nineteen. Now, however, the things we brought with us to my parents' house has to remain confined to our small bedroom; I'm not sure of the exact dimensions, but I know it's less than thirteen by thirteen feet. What little furniture we have fits surprisingly well in to this bedroom: our computer hutch, office chair, dresser, and nightstands are all squeezed in efficiently with just a few inches (sometimes less) of clearance between, and if I angle the TV (which is set on the dresser) just right I can even still play some Wii tennis while standing at the foot of the bed. I do have to walk over Conrad's bed to get to the door, but I scoot it under our bed during the day and he pulls it out himself at night.

I do still have a few partially full paper bags of our belongings in the hallway right outside our door, but eventually I'll purge those, too.

If nothing else, this experience has taught me how unimportant and really what a burden material things are. They restrict one's freedom more than just physically, but also psychologically and spiritually. To move physically, we must carefully pack and label all our little objects and ensure they reach our shared destination and, if they don't, that becomes a problem in which we become invested emotionally.

I'm liking things less and less, but I still have so many!

I think I finally understand why my boss at Borders didn't celebrate Christmas. It's just a holiday where a bunch of people spend money they could apply better elsewhere in their lives to buy other people things they usually don't want or need. I'm not to a point in my life where I can stop celebrating Christmas/Yule, but I would like to celebrate it less commercially now. I'm not especially inclined to make people home made gifts and, honestly, my knitting is still not really good enough that anyone would want me to knit them anything, but I think I can come up with something; if I ever get a working soap kitchen set up, I would be thrilled to inundate all my loved ones with home made soaps year round, whether they like it or not! At least if they didn't want the soap, they could re-gift it or use it to wash their dogs.

I also realize that I still have a serious problem when it comes to books. I love books! I love books of all sorts: hard backs, trade paper backs, mass markets; sci-fi, fantasy, classic literature, non-fiction, children's books, table top RPG guides, just name it! Lately the books of which I've collected the most are table top RPG guides, because I can get them so cheaply (and sometimes for free) at DragonCon, but the truth is that I will probably never even get around to reading, let alone playing, most of the ones I bought last year. I've already enjoyed some of them, like the guide for the diceless Chronicles of Amber roleplaying system, but I'm never going to read all of the Ars Magica supplements I have in storage right now. Otherwise I've been very good about not buying books and going to the library instead. There will be books I owned before the storm that I will consciously seek out and replace, but it will be a much more limited collection than what I owned before, because owning a ton of books on Wicca won't make me any more Wiccan or enlightened than I am, and owning a ton of sci-fi or fantasy novels won't make me any more geeky or interesting than I am - they will only burden me with their being there and being unenjoyed by others.

As for my huge collection of Ars Magica supplements, I must choose to either read them or part with them. When we get in to a house and I unpack them I must promise myself to either read them within six months, or try to sell them on eBay. To my friends: this is something you must remind me of if I seem lackadaisical on the issue!

Like most people, I tend to try to define myself through my possessions to a certain extent, which is odd because that's not something I really do through my appearance since Hurricane Katrina and which would probably be more constructive, although not much more, because it would require the acquisition of more clothes. I think for me to be really happy, I must define myself not through my outward appearance, my relationships, or through my possessions, but through my creativity. It is time for me to begin enriching myself again.

From all of this and from Carl's example I am learning steadiness, too, which has never been my talent, and it will help me from going too far with my creative impulses and leading myself too far out of balance. Despite everything that happened after the storm, including my uncontrollable spiral in to a very deep depression, he has remained constant, just plodding ahead steadily and making sure what needed to get done got done, while I grasped at whatever little threads of hope I could. Some of that grabbing resulted in good things, like the documentary in which we took part, but for the most part I could not find anything solid enough to grab onto and pull myself up; that is a process that is still gradually happening and I feel like, while I am still struggling with Post-Katrina life, I am finally beginning to see the light and find my feet again. Coming home has been a part of this, too.