I’ve started writing a lot about home, an intention that I shared with you in February. But since I haven’t fully explained why I think these discussions are so important, or even exactly what I mean by home, I’d like to do that here today. Hold onto your seats!

Here’s the best definition of home that I can offer you: home is the place you always come back to. In a literal sense, it can be a physical place, defined by the boundary of your abode’s four walls, or a set of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates you can pin down on a map. In an emotional sense, home is the place you come back to for comfort at the end of a long day (and who you are after your public or professional persona has been turned off). More broadly, it encompasses everything from the relationships you share with your partner, family, pets, and roommates to the community that surrounds you. In some cases, home might be a constant, something you could set your watch to—in others, it might be a fluid thing defined by some aspects more than others (like, say, your relationships, more so than place). So when I talk about “home,” I mean different things in different instances: your living space, your values, your people. It’s your personal sphere of influence, whatever that looks like.

As young adults graduating into the world, we don’t exactly lose our old homes, but we are expected to create new ones for ourselves—a heady task that probably requires more guidance than we’re given by our parents, educators, and society. I’m no expert on this matter, but that’s the point—none of us are. We’re leaving a previous life of structure for an undefined new existence. We make our way as best we can, and glean knowledge from our mistakes and experiences.

(more…)

Okay, then: enough wistfulness about the home I’m currently stuck with. On to the empowering stuff!

In post-graduate life, a huge part of making a home for oneself involves striving for (and attaining) financial independence. While making my own money and paying my own bills was the biggest adjustment to life in the real world, it was also one of the most rewarding ones. Managing my own money is part of what I think of as the business of home—a household, after all, being the smallest (and one of the most important) economic units in society. In my little household, student loans have been a big part of the financial story thus far, and I want to talk about them here with you.

(more…)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about home.

I’ll start by saying this: I’m not sure I’ve ever really had one. My (divorced) parents changed residences a few times between them; plus, I spent my pre-college years bouncing between their respective places. I still do, whenever I’m back in Illinois. Maybe as a result, I started to feel twitchy about this lack of stability—I was always anticipating the next upheaval.

College didn’t help much in the way of stability, since students are generally condemned to spending each year in a new, cramped dorm room. And, as I’ve mentioned here, I’ve spent the the past two post-grad years floundering around in some pretty bleak parts of the D.C. metro area. I looked at this experience with rose-colored glasses for a long time, until the situation deteriorated (hi, bedbugs!) and it just became clear that I needed more for myself. Until recently, I’d been filling my weekends with travel plans and cooking sprees, but I came to realize that even a full refrigerator wasn’t getting me any closer to the safe haven I craved. My constant desire to leave town didn’t help, either.

(more…)

On the way back from work tonight, my usual route met me with its usual, miserable traffic jam. But this time, the cause was different. Instead of the normal volume-related pileup, tonight’s roads were clogged because someone had abandoned his car in the middle of Route 7. I reached, then passed the darkened vehicle eventually, but glancing at it sideways, I didn’t feel one twinge of annoyance. Honestly, I couldn’t really blame the guy.

Because I know what it’s like to feel like cutting and running, too. I’m confined all day by claustrophobia-inducing cubicle walls, y’all. There’s that aforementioned and predictably atrocious commute, plus a no-longer-homey apartment (it hasn’t been the same since my neighbor’s bedbugs invaded my own four walls. Yeah, let’s not talk about that). I have big plans in the works, of course, ones that (fingers crossed) will change all of the above. And I promise you’ll hear about them when the time is right. But until the day my lease is up, I’ve resolved to find inspiration in the parts of my life I still control.

Recently, I’ve found hope in the posts of two new-to-me blogs. At Makeunder My Life, Jess Constable has written about creating a home in the way that Michelangelo created his statue of David. (“It is easy,” he apparently said of sculpting a masterpiece from a boulder. “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”) Instead of finding peace in consumption, Jess talks about finding it through “exfoliating” unnecessary possessions, making her home’s trash-to-treasure ratio more favorable by subtracting, not adding. John and Sherry Petersik, over at the very fun home blog Young House Love (represent, Virginia!), seem to share a similar philosophy. It’s encapsulated in this post on living happily with less. And from their (very smart) posts on frugality, I’ve been inspired to start using and enjoying the things I already have—everything from pantry items to that long-ignored Netflix subscription.

(more…)

Yesterday, I woke up in America, but I still felt blissfully empty. This was a lingering lightness, a holdover from vacation that I longed to hold onto: a clarity of mind, and a slackness of shoulder muscles free of worry. It’s a shame that to desperately grasp at keeping such a sense of calm is only to push it further away, because if I could make this clearheadedness stay with me—just for awhile—I’d use all the brute force I could muster.

Most of my time abroad was spent exploring and consuming gelato, but I’ll save the details of those particular kinds of loveliness for later. Right now, I want to tell you about something more unassuming, borne from a threateningly cloudy afternoon in Croatia. I spent part of that afternoon gazing at the Adriatic from marble steps on Split’s seafront promenade; it was a moment midway through the trip in which I stopped to take a breath. In that moment, I found that I didn’t miss my laptop, my wardrobe, my apartment, or any other possessions I’d come to rely on in America. I sat there with Ted as a collective island in this sea of new sights and citizens, and somehow I still felt completely at home—like a baby nestled in a security blanket. Only this was a blanket of new and different stripes, one that I hadn’t realized could provide such comfort to me.

(more…)

Ask a little less of yourself. When was the last time someone said that to you? Because I have the sneaking suspicion that the minute I learned how to crawl, society started wagering about when I’d get on my feet and walk already. Whenever I accomplished something big, it was celebrated sincerely, and then assumed I’d wake up the next morning to try for something bigger. And so on and so forth, until I’d adopted the treadmill as my own, as an intrinsic thing I couldn’t shake, that would periodically drive me nuts and require Jersey Shore marathons and copious amounts of brownies to face the next expectation I thought I had to live up to.

Whew. Is it just me? I certainly hope so. I hope somebody told you, preferably early on, that there’s another way. That you’d be okay if you stopped to enjoy the scenic overlook for awhile before driving single-mindedly on to the next landmark. That it’s normal to tread water every once in awhile, saving your strength for the next push forward. It’s been a realization I’ve come to naturally with age—that is, with experience and perspective. Still, I hope your parents, teachers and mentors gave you a knowing pat on the head whenever you got that crazed look in your eyes and said “Shhh. Just relax.”

After a tiring few weeks, that little voice in my head started telling me the exact same thing. So last weekend, I made no plans. I soaked in a tub full of lavender Epsom salts and finally read the last chapter of that book I’d been working on. I watched entirely too much True Blood—plus a particularly bad Lifetime movie about a haunted sorority—and didn’t even let myself feel like a waste of space. I went on a bike ride at sunset just to feel the wind whooshing in my ears, then let the mosquitoes chase me back home. I even managed to clean my apartment, but only because it felt like active meditation, especially with something on the record player and the smell of Murphy’s Oil Soap hanging in the air.

(more…)

When you start a lifelong hobby at the tender age of sixteen, it’s virtually guaranteed to see you through a lot: various stages of awkwardness, confusion, frustration, epiphany, and change, for starters. It’s called growing up, and I toured those stages of adolescence and young adulthood quite literally on foot. For the past eight years, I’ve been a runner, each footstep carrying me though life as I know it. As you can imagine, I’ve worn through many pairs of Asics in the process.

As a sophomore in high school, I picked up the jogging habit that was already a constant in my dad’s life. Up until that point, my music knowledge had been gleaned from the same parental sources: I’d listened to a strange combination of Motown and classical symphonies forever, never really extending my own musical tastes past the edges of theirs. And while oldies and opera sufficed as the soundtrack for family car trips, my new running habit allowed for freedom of musical choice. Armed with headphones and a Discman, I added artists to my repertoire, slowly becoming enamored with the songs that propelled me on increasingly lengthy jogs. I discovered Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan a few years into my running career, at eighteen or nineteen, swam to the bottom of their discographies and drowned myself in sound. All the while, I was pounding pavement or snaking through wooded trails, running away from a few heart-ripping breakups and familial dysfunction, and towards new friends, new love, and eventual peace within my home.

(more…)

I’m not usually one to miss important milestones. But it seems that I graduated from college one year ago last May, and the entire month swept by without my recognizing the anniversary.

In the grand scheme of things, how meaningful is this milestone, really? It’s not a day that we’re socially conditioned to remember, like we recognize a close friend’s birthday with a restaurant dinner, or our wedding anniversaries with gifts that riff on paper, silver, or lace. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my college graduation ceremony, it’s that life no longer hands you obvious deadlines, and the rest of your life’s “universal” rites of passage can be counted on two measly fingers (marriage, and babies—if you even choose to dabble in either). For twenty-two years, my classmates and I were shuttled in lockstep through various life stages with astounding predictability, mostly thanks to our highly-structured educational system. And then? We reached the last page of our guidebook the day we donned one-size-fits-all gowns and threw our tasseled caps in the air. In the wide-open plains of post-graduate life, we’ve had to find our own meaning and order. You know, construct our own roads and fences, if you’ll beat that metaphor to death with me.

So I chose to celebrate this belated anniversary, arbitrary though it may be, and I celebrated with cake. That’s how all milestones should be marked, right? It was banana chocolate walnut cake, extraordinarily light but equally flavorful, and yet simple enough for the made-up occasion. There was ice cream too, of course.

(more…)

Lately, dear readers, you may have noticed a certain blahness creeping into my prose. I can blame the cold, gray weather all I want, but there’s no denying it. From my itchiness to ditch D.C. to stressing over free-time activities, I’ve sounded downright uninspired. My silver-scaled high heels have been hung up for awhile, with dancing around in them being the last thing on my mind. But I think I’ve gotten to the root of the problem: I’m stuck in survival mode.

There are certain hallmarks of the adult world that just come with the territory— the bills, the congested commute, the nine-hour workday. And in the shock of transitioning from the all-inclusive, flexible world of college, I think we’re all inclined to buckle down and go through the motions a little bit. Turn on the radio as you sit in rush-hour traffic, and take deep breaths when the umpteenth car cuts you off. Strategically hide your Internet browser behind an Excel spreadsheet as you subtly surf away the hours of a slow day. They’re survival mechanisms, and they soothed me when I was learning the ropes of working life. But there’s a point when you have to reach past survival mechanisms, I think, lest they become your entire existence. I’ve reached that point.

So! I’ve pinpointed some of the areas in adult life that entice me into choosing the same safe option, over and over again. And I’ve brainstormed some ways to give the “safe option” the middle finger (politely, of course). Rebel with me, why don’t you?

(more…)

To me, balance is a word that should conjure feelings of calmness and safety, of natural order; it’s a word that indicates everything is in its proper place, neither in danger of tipping over nor upsetting the status quo. But it’s funny how that ideal is hardly ever attained: balance is a buzzword tossed around in arguments about ballooning federal deficits and balancing our national budget, and used to bemoan that fact that Americans are increasingly stressed out because they can’t attain a work-life balance. When I see the word in print or hear it come out of somebody’s mouth, it’s always in op-ed pieces written in indignant voices, or in serious-sounding features on the nightly news.

The word has been running through my head a lot lately, and partly because of those negative associations, I feel panicky when my subconscious starts lecturing me about living a balanced life. There are so many things that are important to me: visiting and calling my friends; nourishing my creative side by writing and taking photos; cooking and baking (so my meals don’t consist of fried eggs and toast too often); going on dates with my boyfriend; running outside with electropop blasting; leaving enough free time to rest on the couch as Koko sleeps in my lap and a movie plays in the background. Of course, though, my nine-hour workdays often drift by ultra-slowly; it’s only after work that the hours seem to slip away from me. And that’s when I’m taking inventory of everything I want to accomplish that night, to feel fulfilled enough so that I can wake up the next morning and do it all again.

(more…)