The Quality of the Light

I always question my life choices in mid-February. The cold and the snow have lost their novelty, and the festiveness of the holidays is long gone. I wonder why I live in Portland, how I ended up in this career, and I despair of ever finding happiness, whatever that means. Then the days get slightly longer, the light takes on a more golden aspect, and I feel much better. It's not that those questions disappear, but I can approach them with more equanimity. I'm less inclined to blow up my life.

This weekend, I did not look at the news once. I have deleted Bluesky and TikTok from my phone and glance at Instagram only sparingly. I imagine the horrors continue, but nothing that has seemed to require immediate action on my part. The activities of my enemies (both personal and political) remain blissfully unknown to me.

Instead, I'm in my third straight weekend of intense house-related projects and am finally approaching some sort of equilibrium after nearly two and a half years in my condo. (I really hate the word "condo." It's very 1980s, very Patrick Bateman.)

Left to myself, with no guardrails, I exist in chaos: clothes strewn across the floor, dishes piled in the sink, Diet Cokes cans spread hither and yon. My mother once claimed that my messiness was somehow downstream of my intelligence, that I just found mess more interesting than order.

This is not true. Mess makes me depressed. But that depression, a deep lethargy, makes it all the more difficult to remedy it. The problem has been particularly acute since I bought my condo. I bought the place less than two months after taking a demanding new job, and in the wake of the first significant heartbreak I'd experienced in nearly a decade. (I was freakishly energetic in the immediate aftermath: taking a new job, buying a condo, and running my first half marathon, all to get myself as far away as possible from that rejection. And then promptly ran out of steam. It mostly worked out, but if you find yourself in a similar situation, maybe pause and reflect.) I woke up every day for the first six to eight months overwhelmed by all there was to do and dispirited by how little capacity I had to do it. I usually just distracted myself with other things, or wallowed in my lack of motivation, wiling away hours on the couch every weekend scrolling.

Up to this point, progress has been slow, any sense of order fleeting. I'd somehow find the energy to get it into halfway decent shape (or pay someone else to do it), only for it to immediately slide back into ruin.

This was primarily because a) my energy remained low due to continuing stress from my job and the lingering effects of an increasingly distant romantic disappointment and b) I didn't have any systems in place. My habits remained atrocious. Like most people, I need certain conditions to be met for me to be a functioning human: relative order in my surroundings, regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and a certain amount of social interaction. And these all can feel, at times, like separate boulders I'm trying to push up their respective hills at once – as soon as I get one of them mostly up the hill, another one slips from my grasp, and then a third, and soon I'm trapped underneath several boulders at the bottom of this sad valley of my mundane ambitions. I need to clean the apartment, but I don't have any energy. I need to exercise to have energy, but I'm too overwhelmed by the state of the apartment. I feel lethargic because I'm eating garbage because the kitchen is too messy to cook in. None of this makes me particularly eager to go anywhere or meet anyone. I manage to meet my work commitments and maybe a friend hang or two, but I am consistently exhausted and demoralized.

A few things have shifted to allow me to get – for the moment – all the boulders to the tops of their respective hills.

• My energy levels have rebounded thanks to the salutary effects of time. I had been on an upswing last fall (and heading in the right direction since late 2023), but the election, and the inauguration, hit me pretty hard and mid-February brought all its usual unpleasantness that triggered a lot of additional stress, anxiety, and anger, but it's evened out now.
• My upstairs bedroom was finally painted, which allowed me to start thinking about how the room would actually be arranged, something that seemed pointless while there was still a caravan of paint samples traipsing across every wall.
• I dug my under-desk treadmill out from the utility closet and tried to spend 10-15 minutes in the morning and 10-15 minutes in the evening walking while watching TV (the 1990s BBC miniseries of Middlemarch), with the idea of increasing my endurance to the point where, once it was slightly warm outside, I could start jogging again. The weather, which had been frigid, also improved and I've been able to actually walk outside.
• I got a Costco membership, and spooked by the constant threat of economy-destroying tariffs, I have stocked up on non-perishables, including a few things that have made cooking for myself much easier even when I'm stressed or tired, like mac and cheese, frozen broccoli, and rolled oats. In the warmer months, I have a smoothie with greens in it every morning that keeps my stomach happy (I've had issues since my 20s), but I found the prospect of a cold smoothie very unappealing when the temperature was in the single digits. The oatmeal, with frozen blueberries, maple syrup, peanut butter, and some pumpkin seeds has been a vast improvement. It's helped me also stop eating the free bagels and muffins at the office on Tuesdays.
• I deleted social media apps from my phone (with some backsliding the past couple of weeks, which has now been arrested), which has greatly improved my mood and increased my attention span/focus. I deleted all social media after Trump was first elected in 2016 and I would just read books for hours. I'm finally getting back into that groove, and with many of the same benefits and drawbacks: I have started having dreams again, which is probably good for working things out via my subconscious, but these dreams are also pretty uniformly unpleasant, so it's a real "better out than in" situation.
• I've deleted Spotify and bought an old CD boombox for $10 at Goodwill and a couple of Joni Mitchell albums at Bull Moose for $20. I found an old external hard drive full of MP3s, and transferred them all to a newer, bigger, more reliable external hard drive. I downloaded Swinsian, a desktop music app for Mac that looks like the old iTunes, before iTunes became bloated and unusable (and now, gone). I may get a CD burner and an MP3 player. I have been trying to detach from my phone as much as possible, and I'm trying to put its various functions back into their own devices: music on a music player, photos on an actual camera, with the phone itself mostly for texting, email, and stuff like Duolingo or my meditation app. (Related: do you know point and shoot digital cameras now cost $1000?)
• I re-engaged with a lot of my pandemic-era habits: I use an app called Streaks to prompt myself to complete very basic tasks as well as things that make me feel better, including drinking water, making my bed, doing some Duolingo, meditating, reading, walking, doing the dishes, etc. If I get all the tasks on a screen done, they all turn gold, which is very satisfying. Someone on Instagram talked about using Finch, where you complete tasks to...enrich the life of a bird? And given how motivated I am by the approval and disappointment of fictional cartoons on Duolingo, I think it would probably also work well for me.
• These little habits have helped support bigger changes, like the elimination of Diet Cokes and limiting coffee to the mornings. I've swapped in Topo Chicos for the Diet Cokes, and may eventually get a Soda Stream to eliminate all the annoying cans – another source of clutter.

I also just decided that the house was the most important thing. That rather than being just another boulder, it was the foundation for the whole edifice. If I got it into shape – and truly into shape – it would serve as the basis for everything else. I also focused on creating habits around keeping the house in order, so that I wouldn't lose any progress I gained while my energies were focused on the next phase of the project. This was focused primarily on two areas: a clean sink and clear floors and counters. If there was a dish in the sink, I washed it straightaway rather than put if off until later. If something – a cat toy, a sock, a random piece of paper – was on the floor, I picked it up – again, right away. It also helped me to connect the orderly environment to my mood in a very concrete way. I wasn't keeping things clean to be considered a functioning member of society but rather because disorder made me overstimulated and unhappy. It was like opening up Bluesky and feeling my blood pressure immediately spike, and reminding myself, every time I was tempted to open it again, that that was what awaited me.

President's Day weekend, Portland got hit with the largest snowstorm we've had in at least five years. Six or so inches on Saturday was followed by 12 to 15 on Sunday. I had planned ahead and stocked up on essentials with the expectation that I would not leave the house for three days. This time inside allowed me to really put a dent in all I needed to do, including making a double batch of this carrot soup from Smitten Kitchen to ensure I used up all of the six-pound bag I'd bought at Costco.

The next weekend, considering my options, I decided to keep pushing forward on the apartment rather than diverting my energy to a creative project or social things. I focused on the bathroom, sorting through the various unguents in the medicine cabinet and the random toiletries in the closet. It looks pretty good now that I've narrowed it down to the essentials (mostly the top shelf, and I probably won't be buying the Educated Mess again or the Dieux cleanser):

While out running errands, I stopped by HomeGoods, not one of my normal stops. I usually find it overwhelming and any desire to purchase anything is quickly snuffed out by the sight of the extremely long line. However, I stopped in for brainstorming purposes and idly examined the rugs hanging up in the furniture section. One, dark blue with a bright floral pattern, caught my eye, but there was no tag. The thought of tracking down an employee seemed daunting, and I eventually put back the items I had meant to purchase and headed for the exit. The rug had been from the Rifle Paper Company, and I figured I could possibly find it online. A search on the way back to my car was fruitless. I paused and reconsidered. I was hoping to get rugs for the large upstairs bedroom, to create some separation between the different "zones." This rug would go in my reading nook. The floral pattern had both the light pink of the walls and the dark green of my reading chair. I turned around to go back inside. As soon as I entered, I immediately made eye contact with an available employee, and quickly explained the situation. She tracked down another employee, who explained the rug had just arrived today – hence the lack of the tag. He quickly wrapped it up and it was waiting for me as I exited the checkout line (which had taken very little time). All in all, it probably took 20 minutes, if that.

Not to get all woo woo on main about a mass-produced textile, but I've increasingly come to believe that you do have to trust the universe. If it keeps throwing obstacles into your path while in pursuit of a goal, an object, or a person, you should heed its warning and consider that it's trying to save you from a situation with an unwholesome energy. By contrast, if it clears the decks for you, or steers you in one direction (sometimes by blocking all other paths) you should heed that, too. Not that you won't ever face challenges in the pursuit of something you want or deserve, but that things should not be pointlessly difficult and frustrating.

Anyway, these little synchronicities made me, a wildly indecisive person, feel good about the impulsive rug purchase and I think it worked out:

The cats like it – maybe a little too much.

This most recent weekend, I tackled the utility closet and the closet upstairs. The painters had removed the (pretty basic) built-in shelving and hadn't replaced it because there weren't any studs and it would have taken more time to go get anchors. I told them to leave it. This has left me without anywhere to hang my vast collection of button-ups. This closet is one of the largest in the apartment and has width beyond what is helpful for clothing or other frequently used items. I thought it might better to use that width/depth for storing things like my air conditioners and then get a clothes rack for my hanging stuff that could be easily removed to access those bigger items. I swung by Lowe's in between my Sunday shifts at the animal shelter and picked one up. Ta-da!

There remains much to be done – the bedroom (as well as other rooms) need new blinds, the weird room between the kitchen and the living room needs to be painted, as does my laundry landing, but this will all have to wait for a bit. The most pressing concern is my shower, where the water pressure has very suddenly slowed to an intermittent dribble. After that, it's the electrical panel, which needs updating. After that, a new dishwasher. (The joys of home ownership!)

In the mean time, some pictures of what I've been reading, the kittens (who are so cute and so annoying), and the 40-year-old sourdough starter I got from my coworker, Kate (it's only taken 10 years, but I think the Mainers have come around to me):