Sunday 4 March 2012

guest post from monkeyblend

I'm very inspired by this mending blog. 2011 was a tumultuous year; it was hard for so many reasons. Mostly there was a lot of change, and I felt like I was caught in a Just for Laughs gag reel where someone was pulling the rug out from under my feet. For me, mending in 2012 will be about finding the things that ground me.

On January 1st, 2012, I started what is proving the be the most difficult, multi-step move I have ever done. I have moved before, but I have never moved with the intention of gutting my old room in my parents' house and starting again in my own hometown.

I moved back here last fall to go back to school. My intention was to land at my folks' place (which is here in the city), find a job to support myself while at school and move out on my own once I could afford it. That's not exactly what happened. Instead I settled into an unhealthy but familiar family dynamic and needed to leave sooner than I could really afford to. While I recognize that I was exceptionally lucky and privileged to have a place to land and get back on my feet, I was horrified to notice myself gradually reverting back to "teenage" mode. It was difficult to see the changes in my personality and my relationships that were the side effects of that. I love my parents, but we have very different outlooks on life and different ideas about how I should live.

Maybe everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents for one reason or another? (I have yet to meet anyone who has an easy family dynamic!) For me, I made a decision to leave my parents' place for good at the beginning of 2012 - partly because I wanted to symbolically separate myself from these unhealthy dynamics and stop re-enacting teenagehood. So I started gutting and sorting my room, saving my pennies, and I moved out.

I have a lifetime of stuff in that house so, although I have made some progress in getting rid of stuff, it might take the rest of 2012 to finish the task. In the meantime, I have a new home and I am building a room of my own.

Here are the photos of what I have been able to build so far. Ten points if you can guess the room theme I am working towards!

1 comment:

  1. I haven't the foggiest what the theme might be, but I dig the brightly coloured walls! A while back, my parents moved in with me (in that order) and things just went south really quickly because they kept trying to parent me and monitor me. You can't do that to a 22 year old who's been living independently since 17 hah. When they left, I moved into my current smaller place and decorated to my heart's content and really made myself a home-nest. It's nice building your space and making it yours.

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