#thefallenshelf

I conned this beautiful, supportive man into a datenight on not-a-date night. I snagged him as he walked in the door with the smell of refried beans and rice with fish tacos on handmade tortillas. Really, he had no chance.

I pulled off the same con two nights in a row! Tonight (which was datenight), I got to take a trip to the pool for a poolside date alla beetroot and apple salad, some Misfit Market mushrooms and veggie patties, but he conned me right back. TWO game nights post-date?! Uho... I'm losing my touch.

Welcome back! A lot has happened in the past year or so. I quit a stable job that was (literally) killing me. I lost a job I really liked, but just wasn’t good enough. I went through 3 months of unsecured employment (that’s my fancy way of saying I was a temp, and grabbed every odd job I could get my hands on), and I’ve spent the last 2 months in a new job I love with people I cherish. That’s just the occupational aspect of my life, but I can finally say: things are looking up around here!

Along with my new job, I relocated back to the town I grew up in (not that I’d moved far from it to begin with). I now live with 3 room mates, 2 of whom have spent the past few years renovating the place. At the beginning of the year, I was still living in the same fixer upper studio I’d lived in for 5 years, and it was still a fixer upper. Intermittently, I moved out of town to the cleanest air I could find in the area, but landed in an apartment with 3 guys who saw me as their mother, and kept absolutely nothing clean, air included. Meanwhile, in a convoluted twist in fate, my dad moved into said fixer upper. The Fallen Shelf is currently in storage, doing its job, and currently not falling apart for the moment.

I mentioned the clean air thing? Yeaaaah, um, so I went through an episode of Revenge of the Asthma, and for the first time in a decade, I was weaker and more immobile than I’ve ever been. I got pneumonia twice in an 8 month period and still had time to get eye surgery to freeze my eye in place, because the top layer of skin was coming lose (yeah, I know, gross, mhm).

I’ve gone from making all of my own meals, to existing solely off of fast food, to gradually being able to bring healthy cooking back into my life, and at one point being so poor that I was only so lucky to have an oven around to cook my own sourdough bread in.

It wasn’t all bad, though. My housemates took pity on me when I lost my job, and my landlord adjusted my rent so that I could still live in the space while I got back on my feet. There were ugly moments of me kicking and screaming despite other people’s kindness. Let’s be real, when you’re miserable and just trying to survive, there is always something to complain about. No excuses, just reasons and reactions.

I made some pretty awesome friends, lost some others, and secured a high school friendship to last the ages. I went through a tortured relationship with a very insecure person who was friends with my worst enemies. I actually had enemies. Finally, I met someone who, like anyone still has insecurities, but we have a wonderful relationship I wouldn’t trade in for the world. It’s hard not to make comparisons on past relationships, when the guy you’re dating is everything you ever wanted in a relationship and more.

It’s true, things are seriously looking up around here. I’m even finally filing through all of my possessions and, uh, “cleaning out my closet,” you might say. And it’s true, I live in a reno, a flippers’ reno. It’s not going to last, here. Everything is constantly changing, but that’s just motivating. In the coming months, I plan on recapturing my life, getting my driver’s license (finally!), and working toward converting a van to hit the road and explore this beautiful continent we live on. Hopefully Count Basey, my basil plant, will survive the transitions! Wish me luck!

As I sit in my new room, surrounded by displaced pans, mugs, baskets, wires, and boxes filled with unnamed treasures, I am battling two perspectives. One is a fearful scope of my past: a gooey, splattering mess I am trying to outrun, feeling like I may never make it, and as it catches up to me and grasps at my ankles, I shrink into it like a comfy old couch, telling myself, “You’ve spent months working on this, “hopeful,” bullshit, and you’ve gotten nowhere!° The other is the reality of how said hopeful perspective is paying off.

For instance: I am no longer unemployed, subsisting on temp jobs (no matter how much I loved the rush and instability of it all). I have a storage unit where I keep all of my art supplies and excess clothes in the furniture I decided not to move with. I’m surrounded by people who are uncertain of me for, instead of people I have been certain I don’t want to be around for a while. I’m breathing fresh air without my purifier running 24/7. I’m in a relationship with a wonderful young man who surprises me every day with the ways he expresses how much he likes me back. My relationship with my dad is healing from the turmoil of misunderstandings, and power struggles (a.k.a. we finally both see each other as adult human beings in the world, trying to get by). My mom and I have come to several new understandings about each other as well. I communicate with my sister. My relationship with my living grandparents is becoming less strained. I have hope for relaunching promising careers in art and writing, while still managing my day job (and they don’t mind that I treat it as a day job so long as I show up and work hard every day). I’ve regained some of my will to live and find out what’s really out there in the world. I have rekindled my fascination with trains and aforementioned art. I live in an amazing new home with people who have been putting tons of care into making it one of the most amazing works of interior and exterior design I have ever seen with my own eyes, and I am challenged every day to be myself and come out of my shell.

I am no longer in an abusive romantic relationship. I am overcoming the abuses of my past. I am still securing myself in my own identity. I recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I will soon be able to cook healthy food for myself without sacrificing my lungs. I am making a few new, good friends who help me strive to be the person I want to be. My new coworkers are great, too!

Truly, things are getting better. I simply have to acknowledge it. Thus, I am starting to commit myself to writing this blog and contributing to its content. Hi, we’ve possibly met before, but I might have lied about my name. My name is Sarah, and I’m looking forward to the future. Thank you for coming.

The name of this blog, for me, was a little tongue-in-cheek. I’ve always been a creative person, but I haven’t always lived alone in my own small apartment. As with any small apartment, it’s not exactly ideal for productive living. The storage is at a minimum. The needs in my life form around the pitfalls of the sacrifices which made the rent so appealing. There is a lot of character in the place I live, but not exactly my own character. In fact, I often find myself in outright denial that this is my own home at all. One thing I know is mine, and I hope will always be mine is a storage solution I’ve had since I was a kid. Where I go, it goes.

This item is my bookshelf. It was given to my mom by one of her best friends. We’ll call her Kathy. Kathy used it as a media cabinet and entertainment center. It was gorgeous bare pine wood, and it was an enclosed cabinet. I was obsessed with the thing while it was in Kathy’s house as an 8 year-old child. It was made of unfinished wood, and it hid the TV. What do you expect from a budding DIYer at the age of 8?

When Kathy gave it to my mom for holding kitchen items, I was ecstatic to have it in our house. Eventually, we moved, and no longer needed it for such items. We did, however, suddenly need a new bookshelf, so she adjusted the shelves, and voila! We had an enclosed bookshelf. The use of this shelf would remain this way for another 10 years, until I moved out with it and all of my books. Thank you, Mom!

At first, it was my kitchen prep-station. Then I gradually acquired more furniture to take its place. This was nice, because the boxes of books were cluttering up my studio. By this time, the fasteners are thereabouts of 15-20 years old. They’re brass, and they’re weaker than they used to be, as a consequence. On top of this, my book collection is several times its original size. No matter how I organized it, several months in, I would set the wrong book on the wrong shelf, and one of its half-inch, socket-insert, corner brackets would fail. The happened so often, that I stopped fixing it on the spot, and simply taping a danger sign to the doors of the cabinet, “Danger: Fallen Shelf,” “Don’t Even Bother,” “Stop! All reading shall cease, until shelf improves.” Obviously, it had turned into a running, personal joke.

The day I decided to create this blog, I had been uploading old pictures to my computer, when I came across a cellphone photo with the taped sign saying, “Danger Fallen Shelf,” appeared in the stream of photos. I laughed. It was perfect. I had just hatched a plan to reinvigorate my home for the umpteenth time, and reorganize my living situation, and the bookshelf was soon-to-become a clothes press. The sign symbolized all of the upheaval in my life, expressed plans to make things better, and motivated me to do something creative with my living space. Alas, a name was born. A project was launched, and my goals changed.

When I first started this blog, I was feeling ambitious. I’m a generally ambitious person, so this isn’t entirely out of character. I am, however, prone to a lack of focus, especially when I really care about something. I psych myself out. I put it up on a pedestal and then I run from its greatness. I do this with a lot of things in life. I do it in relationships, with work, with cleaning my room. It’s a personal flaw I’m fully aware of and work on every day.

For now, instead of being so ambitious, and getting my room photo ready for before and after pictures, I think I’m just going to create the content that I can when I can. There won’t be a strict schedule. It won’t always be about the same thing. I’m finding that I really like talking about gender roles, street dancing and linguistics these days. I used to hate having anything to do with politics.