Displacement

All I can think of these days is bead-board. - wainscoting, chair rails, pastel paint colors, English cottages… the current visual representation of what a life married to form and function looks like to me.  In previous years, it’s been Scandinavian chic.  In the years beyond those it’s been ultra modern, veering heavily on the brutalist side.

When things get upturned in my mind whilst writing, I begin to plan “renovations”.  I suspect those experts in the field of the mind would refer to it as a “coping mechanism”.  But living with this tendency to divert my attention towards equally headache inducing tasks, truly, stirs up just as much chaos as what I am initially running away from.

These “renovations” range in the extent of their complexity: as minor as a new organization system under the bathroom sink, to an elaborate overhaul of multiple rooms in the basement.  But no matter what the actual project is, I make sure to find some way to agonize over the smallest of details, dragging the process out for months, sometimes years at a time.  One would think that in moments of stress, instant gratification is the standard form of relief: alcohol, cigarettes, medication; and the thought of a renovation, involving time, budgets, endless hours of research, would be completely counter to finding relief from an already stressful situation.  But the truth is that the instant gratification of such drawn out processes lies right in its very endlessness.  Every second I get to steep my mind into the complicated world of what it means to live in a house, I get lost in its infinite complexity.  I could lose myself for hours, days, years, just learning about the different fittings that exist for sink faucets if it means that I could forget what it is that truly troubles me so.

Yet, regardless of the compulsive research, it cannot be helped that things will be learned, and conclusions will be made.  A renovation project comes close to its completion, and it is always there, right when it’s a hair’s breadth away from coming to full fruition does it too start to become stressful.  It is in this time, my attention gets diverted back onto the initial problem I had been running away from in the first place.  

Back and forth my attention sways, and through these repeated rounds, I have come to conclude that it is, as if, in order to complete any piece of writing, a sister project becomes necessary in order for the first to be realized.  I’ve often noticed that shortly after a piece of writing is finished, soon too follows the completion of some renovation.  And strangely enough, it is never the other way around.  My mind never wanders to wainscoting when I am not writing.  To be frank, I find the whole matter an utter bore, and an ordeal.  But as soon as the glimmer of a new idea for a short story or essay appears, so too returns the luster of the prospect of some new home improvement. 

If someday, you are to visit me at home, and see me living in slight disarray, amidst a smattering of smart fittings, lovely accents, and perfect finishes strewn about here and there you’ll know that somewhere else in that house, likely in the bedroom, by the desk, in a cabinet, lies a sizable stack of perfectly polished, perfectly wrought compositions.  

painting the closet because a subordinate clause is giving me problems