After years of pretending I don’t live here, I finally realize I do – that I’m living here, in this room, in this house, in this city, in this state, at least for now – and decide to unpack the items I’ve kept in storage in my mom’s garage since I left my Colorado place 14 years ago and moved to Peru.
In the process of converting the space from a guest room into my room, I rearrange furniture and hang up some of the artwork I’ve collected along the way in my travels, been given, or created myself. I put books on the shelves. I engage my mom’s help in finding a comfy chair and a rug to tie it all together.
My nephew, a child of the videocall age, during a recent call in which he’d had me show him the room and noticed the new configuration with more open floor area, tells me, “Thank you for making more room for us to play in.”
As if I’d done it for him, for that purpose.
For what is life but our individual efforts to settle in? To make space to play in? To live our own stories? What is life but an attempt to find out where we belong, even if only temporarily?
Along those same lines, in this year of being a “professional writer,” I’m learning how to step into more of what I want and who I want to be. Even so, I still say professional writer with quotes around it. For I don’t quite know what that means. Except that I show up daily to write, put my work out for anyone to take it if they want to, and have begun to learn the ins and outs of marketing and advertising. It’s a process.
Just as I did for the room, I’m putting parts of myself out on a shelf where anyone can read the titles. And as I do, as I dust and straighten spines, I’m pleased to see old favorites and familiar stories even as I make notes of the books I’d like to add—or in this analogy, the ways I’d like to change, grow, and become better. Not just as a writer, either, but also as a human.
I’m doing all this, so that one day, as my nephew did about my rearranging, I can thank myself for making room in this world for me to be me.
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