Rearranging Our Space

It’s not usually an easy process to rearrange space. Start to finish there are things that need to be moved, things that need to be let go of, and things that need a special new space to occupy. Beginning that process in our office area last week was no different.

I spent the whole of last week wading through our space as it was and dismantling it to make it what it will be. We’ve worked and lived in this space for over six years now and our lives look much different now than they did back then. Resetting to honor those changes and make our space work for us the way our lives are now is a really important thing and not a process we wanted to rush through. I’m grateful for the space that we have and thought about all the work we’ve done to get here. It was more emotional than I realized to move my childhood collections of R. L. Stein, Christopher Pike, and The Babysitter’s Club books by Ann M. Martin to their new spot. I put them in my bookshelf next to my planners, honoring the place my love of stories started next to the place I’m planning and working toward the publication of my own stories. Above those, I set the box with the notebooks, journals, and copies of the very first story I ever intentionally tried to make into a novel. All of those things together are a powerful vignette and one I love to walk past every time I enter my office area. Of course, Elliot from Pete’s Dragon, another very precious part of my childhood, was placed on top of the box to watch over all.

We ended last week with the first half of the basement nearly finished and put back together. We need to take time this week to finish the rest of the first half and then jump into the next half. That part of the basement will need a desk assembled and another desk moved in order to make better space for our daughters to do homework next school year and for my husband’s office space to flow more efficiently for his work and his music. We’re hoping to have this project finished before our girls are on summer vacation so we can relax the first half of the summer and then spend the second half of the summer tackling other spaces around the house that need some attention. For my writing this week, I’ve got some things to think about, not the least of which is that my peer critique group is realigning our meeting model which will support every person sharing regularly again. I found that I’d been leaning away from regular sharing, both because short critique time doesn’t always support feedback on longer pieces of writing and because it felt like a place I could save myself energy by not committing to my writing in that way. I don’t want to let that piece of my writing journey, the thing that will help me get to where I want to go better, get away from me and I want to take time this week to think about what I’m going to bring to critique to share. It goes along with this theme of reimagining, this rethinking how I will share, what I will share, and just what this next chapter of life is shaping up to be.

In case you haven’t been told today, you are more than enough.

With you in words, Nikole