A Room of My Own

I must be repaying some kind of cosmic debt to which I am completely unaware, and I must admit: it’s bringing me down. And even though I felt like crawling back into the bed this morning and staying there beneath the constant hug of the down comforter, I resisted. Instead, I did a little paper cleansing.

I am a borderline hoarder, especially when it comes to keeping my paper records: paid bills, insurance EOBs, bank statements, paycheck stubs, receipts from when I bought gas during Christmas 2008. I stack them up in neat little piles on my desk, and after a while, the piles grow a little unruly. So, today, I gave it up to the shredder. My desk is still a mess, but the unnecessary paper has been eliminated.

Doing this, however, only reinforced how badly the boyfriend and I need to get on with renovating that spare room into my office. But such a big task takes a little bit of money, and money is the one thing I’m presently living without.

I am a sentimental person, and I like to keep things that are of sentimental value to me. I often wish I were the type of person who could just toss things out, set them next to the curb for collection, and just let it go. But I’ve moved so many times and have lived without the people I love for so long that these trinkets hold memories and have become replacements for the people I don’t get to see very often, if at all. My stuff deserves its own room or as the boyfriend calls it, “my own space.” And I couldn’t agree with him more.

In the spirit of Virginia Woolf, I need a “room of one’s own.” There, I could write without disturbance, whether it is a poem or a blog update. I would set up a makeshift worktable where I could hand-bind art books until my fingertips bleed and my heart’s content. I could handcraft notecards that incorporate my original photographs, quirky designs, and found art.

Yes. A room of my own is just what I need.