My Project

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Writer's Cramp


Boxes engulf me.

My family and I arrived in our new hometown of Seattle five weeks ago. Since then, our living space has been dissected and cordoned and blocked by stacks of boxes four and five high. Although the walls are gradually receding, they yet remain, constant reminders of our unfinished transition. Boxes form walls beyond walls.

Our apartment is small—smaller than our apartment back in Connecticut and much smaller than our house immediately prior in New Hampshire. Although we have purged many of our belongings, we still own a lot—a lot more than we can easily store. Squeezing into a small apartment is one of the prices we pay for locating in a happening, urban neighborhood in a happening, urban locale. I love the choice we made. But it brought living conditions that constrain us daily.

Our crampedness most affects me when I sit down to write. I suffer from writer’s cramp. I still haven’t uncovered the small table that will serve as my desk, and so I work at the half–dining room table that we’ve managed to unfold. Or, I write in coffee houses, as I have throughout my adult life. I don’t yet have a writing space in our home. I want a writing space, and I don’t yet have one.

Don’t get me wrong: merely living in this magnificent city excites me continuously. But, as of now, the environs inside my home don’t prod and support my writing the way my outer environs do. Right now, I’m not a Seattle writer—I’m a cramped writer.

Downsizing profoundly has shown me how dependent I am on comfortable writing space. I never really thought about it before, probably because I didn’t have to. Now I know. I need to spread out my books and papers; I need to stretch out my body; I sometimes need to pace back and forth like a first-time expectant father. I didn’t realize that these were my preconditions for free, fluid writing. Now I know.

In their way, boxes are wonderful. They foretell of unpacked joys of sorting through books removed from their old order on their previous shelves—books that will become new again, as if appearing for the first time. I am grateful for the content inside these boxes. But, for the moment, these boxes make my life a bit too boxy. My inner writer roars in anticipation of roaming free inside a cage free from clutter.

2 comments:

Tony said...

Better the books are in a box, rather than your mind!
But seriously, my advice is to find a place that has inexpensive shelving for sale and unpack 3 boxes a day

esther said...

I often fantasize about living in a small studio apartment and paring down my worldly belongings to kitchen essentials, clothes, a cell phone, an accordion, some knitting and crochet tools and an ipad loaded with all the other stuff that used to take up an inordinate amount of space in my life. We are in the process of unloading all of our books and records. We’ve been doing it for years. The task will take years to complete. Admittedly, it’s hard work to part with these objects so I often have to remind myself that the essential content of the objects are still be available for me to enjoy without killing trees, collecting mold and dust and taking up physical and psychological space in my life. When I get rid of another box of old stuff, rather than fixate on what I’ve lost, I make it a practice to ruminate on what I’ve gained.