Last year, this house was a constant source of annoyance. I couldn’t look at it without seeing projects that needed doing, ugliness that needed prettifying, roughness that needed smoothing. No matter how hard I worked the house never looked how I wanted it to, and so the work seemed to be in vain. I yearned to renovate and paint and when the thought of that became overwhelming I clicked my way through online real estate websites, hoping to find my Dream House.

As I poured my heart into hoping, I neglected to use it for doing. The more discontented I became the more I scowled at my house. The nerve of it, being all ugly at me! The nerve of it needing scrubbing and painting and renovating. The nerve of it not being what I had belatedly decided I wanted.

Two and a half months away from my family and my home cured me of my discontent. Now, these battered walls are a joy to me. I am enthralled by the view from our windows, the wooded valley so often wind whipped, the cows in the meadow down far below. Sometimes, there is the distant sound of a train whirring down the tracks on the other side of the valley, and always there is the sky with its constant shifting. Today is a windy day. It is the sort of day that tempts me to throw open the windows and doors and invite the wind in to play. It’s too chilly today and so I yearn for spring.

Yes, our house is battered and old. Yes there is so much in it I would change if I could. But it is also brim full of potential and love. Not unlike me, now I come to think of it. And I find that as I love my home I want it to be more than it is. I want it to be fairly bursting with warmth and care. I even (gasp) am tempted to dust the darn thing. And as I look at myself, and try to love the crazy, neurotic, melodramatic creature that I often am, I smile a little and realize that corny as it may sound, love really is the key. We don’t want to fix what we don’t love. We don’t want to improve that which disgusts us.

So I’m going to love my home, and love my “me”. And soon there will be more to love here than just the potential and the view.

And now begins a project I’ve been meaning to tackle here and that Claira’s brief reprieve from teething is making possible. Introducing another Before and After saga! We start, dear friends, with the upstairs office. The part of the house where I moved all the junk and miscellany from the main floor (which I’ll have to post pictures of SOON, because the pictures that follow are really, really embarrassing). It’s a jumbled mess, covered in dust to boot, and it would be nice if it could be functional again. Heck, it would be nice just to see more than a square foot of carpet…

Neil's desk and bookcases (hidden behind a wall of JUNK).

My desk. My computer is noticeably missing. Hmm...

The filing cabinet side of the room. Hey - we could use those cabinets to FILE things (they're full of junk at the moment).

There's my computer! On an end table, even though I have a desk (there's a short but complicated reason for this).

Once the junk is out, THIS will be the focus of the room.

The Closet.

Tune in tomorrow for the after pictures. Or, hmm…more realistically, check back in a month or two…

Despite all the space and the heady newness of life there in that place, I think my favourite thing was catching the bus. I would hike the six blocks to the bus stop, reveling in the feeling of being self-propelled. Each step was like a revelation. You are doing this, and only you. You don’t have to take the next step. You didn’t even have to wake up this morning. The bed is unmade in the room you have left behind you and no one will care.

It was also an anxious time of course, and I am nothing if not prone to anxiety. I would arrive at the bus stop twenty minutes early each morning, shivering in the slick wet of the rain and the fog. I was full of fear and the sudden transition from high school teacher’s pet to anonymous face in a crowd was a difficult, even galling experience. Freedom wasn’t quite so sweet once I realized that mostly I was free to feel insignificant and foolish on a daily basis.

And then I discovered the computer lab in the basement of the library. Flickering fluorescent lights and the hum of a hundred machines whirring away. I discovered the internet and I soon lost myself in it. There, I could feel clever. There I could feel that I mattered. I threw myself into roleplaying games. Made friends. Was greeted with lines of text shouting glee and excitement every time I arrived. I fell in love, or thought I did, with a man who lived a full country and a sea away from me.

It wasn’t long before I started skipping classes. Started failing classes. I was in self-destruct mode and I had never been there before. Had no idea how to escape. Had no idea how to WANT to escape. My parents finally intervened. I moved back home and transferred to a community college and started over again. So much wasted time. But I flourished there. Made choices that were terrifying but right (and learned that the two are NOT mutually exclusive).

Since that crazy, shaming, painful time in my life I’ve done better at recognizing my self-destructive patterns. Some are easily changed. A brief ah-ha moment followed by a quick change. Some are so deeply ingrained that it is the work of years, if not a lifetime, to rectify them. Like my social patterns. The way I hide myself away and avoid people and then whine and mope that I have no close friends here. Like my eating patterns. How I keep turning back to the junky foods that send my moods spiralling out of control, decimate my self-respect, and drain my energy till I am left listless and apathetic. Like the way I sometimes sit here and despair over the clutter and chaos in my home and choose to spend my time fretting instead of DOING.

Today, I’m pulling myself up short, because I have the freedom, the choice, and the responsibility to do so. And the clarity. That bittersweet gift that allows me to look at my life and really SEE. I can see how I am hurting myself. How I am scratching a thick, deep line through my own hopes. Every day there is something I do that I should not. Something I eat, something I say, something I think or do or do not.

Just because it will take a lifetime or more to realize the hopes I have for myself does not mean I should’t hope them. Doesn’t mean that self-destruct has to be my path.

Did you ever grasp a truth but grasp it imperfectly? As if you’d managed to catch a wee bitty corner of it between your fingers and somehow missed all the rest? I do that often. Have done throughout my life and continue to even now, when a marriage, mortage, and three children hint that maybe I should be more grown up, more clever than that by now.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I have a history of grabbing the wrong end of the stick entirely. I grew up skinny as a rake, thinking being overweight was a silly choice for people to make (I’m now 50 pounds overweight and at one time was much more than that). I thought depression was just an excuse to be lazy and melodramatic all the time (and after my second child experienced severe PPD that locked me in a very bad, very dark place for a very long time). And I once got it in my head that Kindred Spirits had to be kindred in nearly every sense. That particular bit of nonsense has limited my friendshipping to a severe degree.

I thought we had to be the same. I thought we had to think the same sort of thoughts and see the world in the exact same skewed and fractured way. I thought we had to love the same loves and hate the same hates. It disturbed me to find that you loved pickles or couldn’t start your day without your morning cup of coffee. I felt estranged when I learned that reading wasn’t your thing or that you loved to run and feel the pavement stretch grey and fleeting beneath your sneakered feet. Your sun worshipping seemed so foreign to my pale too-easily-freckled self. How could we be friends when you were so, so strange?

And then I reflected on the strangeness of ME. The way I hide in my house and wrap myself in my solitude as if it could protect me somehow. My tendency to hide dishes in the oven when unexpected company arrives and burn the heck out of them later the next day while preheating. My picky eating and the way I read and love the books I touch till they are wrinkled, worn, and waterstained. My absentmindedness and the way I put things off till they become URGENT and panicky. The way I panic over things that aren’t urgent and fall apart with so little provocation.

Oh yes, I am strange indeed. And as the years pass and I come to love you for the friend you are to me, I realize how peripheral it all is. The likes and dislikes. It doesn’t matter if you are married like me, a mother like me, a reader, writer, and musician like me. It doesn’t matter if I can’t understand why you love the things you love, or if you don’t love all the things that I do.

That isn’t what kindred spirits ARE. I got that wrong oh so many years ago and it’s taking far too long to right itself. We are kindred in the ways that matter. Loving, laughing hearts. A desire to be better than we are. Kindness. Tolerance. And a heaping helping of gratitude that we are so blessed to know each other.

This is what friendship should be. What so many of you have taught me that friendship IS. I think I finally get it.

But? Please stay away from me if you have pickle breath. Seriously. I’ll gag.

With love,
Your Friend Kim