Calling Attention to What Needs Work
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I keep promising to post more about my house and about animism, about viewing my house as a living thing, and to be honest I've felt a bit stuck. When I bought the house, I cleaned it to the point where it wasn't full of trash anymore... and then I got stuck. (There were a couple spaces, like the crawl space and the garage, where I couldn't even face cleaning them until I had a friend to help.) It was hard to even think about what I wanted my spaces to look like. I could envision a few pie-in-the-sky, special-purpose spaces that I wasn't going to be able to make for a long time, not until there had been several renovations! But in terms of things like the office, living room, kitchen, where I was actually spending most of my time... nada. Couldn't think about what I wanted in my daily life beyond "tidy."
In the past few weeks, I had a little breakthrough that made it more possible to start to think in these ways.
I sat on the couch in the living room and suddenly realized that it felt empty and forbidding. I talked about this bizarre feeling with a few friends, and on their advice, I made a diagram of how the living room would look if it didn’t feel that way. To my surprise, I was able to really change the room's feeling just by moving things around and adding a few little accents, like new pillows.
I seriously considered sharing some before and after pictures with you, but it felt too vulnerable. You’ll just have to take my word that to me and to the couple of friends who've visited, the room feels both cozier and more open at the same time. The change in energy is palpable. I spent a whole few minutes marveling at the new room!
And then the wasps moved in.
Suddenly there were wasps crawling around on the inside of the front window! They'd probably been there before, but I'd noted them briefly and figured they must have flown in when I left the door open. No such luck. Now I could see that there were just a few too many of them for that. Turned out was a wasp nest in the wall. (I called a professional to deal with it and he was very nice - but the wall needs repairs in the spring to stop it from happening again.)
And what was that funny smell coming from under the stairs? It was a few dead voles. I hadn't looked under there in a while. (I put on PPE and disposed of them, eurgh.)
Even though I’d improved things in the house, I ended the day more despairing about it than when I'd begun.
This really happened, but it is also a metaphor for what’s been happening in therapy.
Sometimes to solve a problem, or even to envision what the solution might be, you have to become more aware. You have to be able to feel it in a new way. And when you develop that capacity, it also makes you more aware of other problems.
It feels like "two steps forward, one step back" - but really you're not going back at all. You're developing a capacity. The voles and the wasps were already there, but now you're noticing them more because you are ready to notice. And being ready to notice puts you very close to being ready to deal with the problem.
I'm still animistically convinced that the house is alive, but I haven't made much progress at actually figuring out how it feels, what it needs, or if it has anything to say to me. Despite following some of the practices Marie Kondo recommends (like saying hi to the house when I come home), I haven't, like, made contact with its consciousness.
But every time I try, I end up understanding more about my own.