Stuck

“Adeline knocked lightly on the bedroom door and pushed it open. Rose was sitting in the window seat, attention focused on the ground below. Her arms were so frail, her profile so gaunt. The room had grown listless in sympathy to its owner, cushions flat, curtains sagging in despondence. Even the air seemed to have staled within the streams of weak light.”

--from The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton


At some point during my first year in Chicago, I suffered a terrible heartbreak of the romantic kind. The details are not important. Just suffice it to say that I lost both a friend and a hope for the future, and I took it hard. It was several weeks before I felt like life started to look up again.

I lived with roommates at the time. Many months (maybe even years) later, one of my roommates told me that my heartbreak had an effect on her, too. “You could just feel the sadness as soon as you walked into the house,” she said. I never sensed this at the time, perhaps because my own sadness just kind of followed me around. But I’ve thought a lot about that comment since then.

Physical spaces have a way of reflecting the nature and moods of the people that inhabit them. For example, every time I walk into my parents’ house, it seems the same and yet somehow different. Eventually, I’ll spot a new wall decoration, or a new paint color, or a new rug. My parents’ house gives off a feeling of familiarity while still changing enough to always feel well put together and new. This is the same way I would describe my mother. On the other hand, the basement of my parents’ house, which mostly functions as my dad’s workshop, is clean, efficient, and cleverly organized, but unadorned. This is just how I would describe my father.

It seems like this effect might simply be due to the fact that the dwellers in a space choose the layout, colors, and furnishings. But is it more than that? Can a space adopt a person’s mood without the person intending it to do so? After all, my house got sad when I was sad. And I can still remember the feeling of my grandfather’s apartment after he passed away. The only word that could describe it was “lifeless.”

Being a mathematician at my core, I can’t help but look for a pattern here. It seems to me that the positive vibes like newness and efficiency are the result of intentional changes made by the dweller, while negative vibes like sadness are adopted without any specific action. I’m really not one to say arty, hippie things like “Rooms are alive!” so I think there must be some other explanation for the negative half. Inanimate objects don’t just change on their own, so what’s the real deal?

I think perhaps it is that negativity is self-perpetuating. When someone enters a period of sadness, things initially get a little drab because people don’t tend to clean or spruce up their living spaces while they are unhappy. Then, because the space around them starts to look shabby, they just stay sad. Eventually the surroundings seem to have changed to match the mood. But really, it’s the space influencing the mood, not the other way around.

Over the past few years, I’ve felt a little stuck. I love my job and I love Chicago, and yet I can’t help feeling sometimes that not much has changed for me over the last five years. I still don’t really feel like I’ve been out of college a long time. I certainly don’t think of myself as an adult. I’m just still in that awkward transition phase between the formative college years and the time when I really feel like my life has a direction. I’m just… stuck. And I want to be unstuck.

Oddly enough, getting a new set of bathroom towels gave me an idea of how I might start to get unstuck. For my birthday last month, my mother bought me a new shower curtain and towels for my bathroom. I put the new things up, and the small room looks completely transformed. It looks grown up and put together. It looks how I want to feel.

After realizing this, I looked around at the rest of my apartment. The blankets on my bed are made of t-shirts from high school and college. The couch in my living room is a loveseat that was in my parents’ house for several years while I was in college. The dishes in my kitchen are the same ones that my grandparents used at a cottage that was sold years ago. No wonder I feel like I haven’t moved on. Much of my apartment is still stuck in the past. It’s another case of the space perpetuating a negative vibe.

So, now I’m on a mission to set aside some money each month and buy my own things to replace the ones that have me stuck in the past. A bedspread first, maybe. Then dishes and perhaps eventually a full-length couch. I’ll choose things that reflect the positive, grown-up vibes I want to feel. Hopefully then, I feel like I’m able to get unstuck.