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Archives from 2002-2006

Have you ever thought about a thing as an impossible-to-fulfill fantasy and then one day the thing is completely and totally real and it’s almost too much to take in? I felt like that when I crossed the finish line on my one and only marathon, and I feel that way now when I sit in my brand-new studio.

I’m calling it a studio because that’s the best term I can think of for what it is, which is a small but sturdy outbuilding in our backyard.

Originally, it was going to be a TuffShed, because that was the inspiration. You know those ‘she shed’ designs that have been popping up in home shows for several years now? (Some legitimately brilliant marketing mind was like, hey what if you slapped a chandelier up in this thing and instead of being full of rusty shovels it had teal chevron curtains?) The TuffShed route ended up being expensive enough that it felt worth it to invest the extra into an actual outbuilding with a foundation, insulation, electricity, etc.

It’s taken a while to come together. We did parts of it ourselves (and by “we” I mean “John, but I did technically help snap in a floorboard or two”) but used contractors for plenty of things and all of that took time. Then suddenly it was just FINISHED, and within the last week or so I added the furniture and lighting, and now it’s a whole entire space that’s just for me.

And just what DO I plan to do in there, exactly? I mean, how could I possibly be spending my time that would justify such a splurge, right?

I’ve had a long and weird struggle with feeling as though I deserve this studio. Part of it has to do with the exotic notion of an outbuilding that’s for a woman, like yes of course a man building a shop or garage makes perfect sense, that’s just basic dude stuff, but a lady doing the same thing? I shit you not, our contractor laughingly asked me to my face — in front of another worker! — where I was planning to put the pole.

(Did I send him packing? I did not. I wanted my goddamned studio finished, so I could get in there and sage-smudge the fuck out of everything.)

But part of it is just the same old tape that’s been on repeat for decades: not good enough, don’t deserve it. I know this voice for what it is now, a protective gesture gone haywire. Shhh! to that. There was no deserve to this, it’s just desire plus circumstances: it was a thing I dreamed about, and we eventually had the space and the resources to make it happen.

What I do in there: yoga, work, Zoom meetings, personal writing, reading, sitting. Sometimes I just lie on my yoga mat and look up through the skylight at the clouds moving by overhead.

It’s so incredibly quiet and peaceful in there. It’s full of natural light and it smells like just-cut wood and the faint linger of fresh paint, everything brand new and full of possibility.

The weather has been grey and wet for long enough that it’s already hard for me to remember how parched the end of summer felt. I had been looking forward to the cooler temperatures but not the lack of sunlight: it is so GLOOMY when it’s cloudy, and of course as soon as we roll the clocks back it’ll be vampire-dark at, like, 3:45 PM.

Everything outside is currently a mess of mud and decomposing fallen leaves and so of course that is what every pea-brained member of the household is continually tracking onto the carpet, and by pea-brained I am most definitely including both teenage boys as well as the adult male, all three of which should know better and YET.

“SHOES,” I find myself saying over and over and over again, like some sort of not-very-smart parrot who knows how to screech exactly one plural noun. “SHOES!”

I hate being the Shoe Police, not only for the boring nagging it requires but because of my personal pet peeve about no-shoe-households, which seem overly fussy and incompatible with actual life. However, I have also learned that repeatedly wiping up carpet stains is also incompatible with certain things, such as sanity.

“But why don’t you make the FLOOR RUINERS scrub the floor?” you may be saying, because you are a sweet summer child full of hope. O, I have chosen this path many times, for I too am occasionally dazzled by life’s many possibilities! — but wow, talk about making things worse. (“Did you clean with a … Sharpie?”)

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