in a stranger's apartment, or upstate, or not stuck in your own head
sometimes you need a change
“You are not stuck. You are not stuck. Life is painful, always will be, but don’t be afraid to be scared. It’s a part of all this, you know.”
The elevator door shut on my tanti as she softly but frantically relayed this message to me when I left her apartment. Her wisdom always gives me more than thirty therapy sessions in a row.
It’s not a secret that the last month or so of my life has seen me in the great trenches of depression, with an overwhelming sense that I am not myself, in all the ways that it feels possible to feel absent from one’s own life. I’ve been largely confined to my room or my apartment, applying to jobs, doing odd work here and there, sometimes writing articles or checking my bank account again and again until it drives me up a wall. Stuck mentally. Stuck physically.
It wasn’t until last week that I decided I was sick of myself—or sick of the version of myself I’ve been lately. Getting tired of your own bullshit is a great motivator, as it turns out, to change some of the things you don’t like. I needed to get out of my head. But I also needed to get out of my apartment.
Since then, physically, I’ve co-worked at friend’s places, sat at a cafe with my laptop, visited my tanti’s apartment for a conversation that rubbed my lenses into something cleaner through which to see myself, took a hiking trip upstate for the day, and now, I sit writing this newsletter in a total stranger’s apartment.
Okay, not total strangers. But in the apartment of married women I only just met this weekend, who asked me to babysit while they’re at a service for Yom Kippur and the baby sleeps.
The Hudson Valley is really, really pretty at the beginning of October when all the leaves are just turning, even if you’re sweating in three layers in sixty degree weather because you’ve just hiked to the top of a huge ass mountain.
Whether it’s sitting in an apartment that isn’t my own or hiking up a mountain in the Hudson Valley, I’m finding doing things slightly out of my comfort zone, or at least my sitting-still-and-existing-in-the-easiest-way-possible-zone, to be soothing. It forces me to explore. Whether a stranger’s tea cabinet, or a town I don’t know. It’s the necessity of moving myself (NOMM if we want to go FOMO-ing this shit) that jolts me into living.
Mentally, there’s nothing quite like putting yourself in a new place or situation, even if only for 10 minutes, or 10 hours. It’s reminding me of the same thing my therapist reminded me a few weeks ago when I told her I was worried about this—getting stuck, becoming the worst version of myself, spiraling into total disrepair, and staying there for good—“You’ll only get stuck if you let yourself.” She didn’t say it or mean it in a shame-y way, only that I decide how long I let myself wallow and plunge deeper into an abyss.
So I’m taking baby steps to getting better, and trying to find joy in new spaces and situations I might put myself in. In order to not be who I’ve been, or to return to versions of myself that I’ve met and liked, I need to not sit still. It’s not that my depression has gone away or that I feel incomparably better. I feel like I’m very much still struggling. But either I can hate myself into staying in bed. Or I can get up and find myself somewhere new, lovingly forcing myself to find myself again. To find that life is painful and confusing, yes, but there are new situations to navigate, new places to bring me out of my head and out of my brain fog—to find that there are spaces in between the stuckness, spaces where I exist as something and someone other than the black hole I feel I’ve been, and as my tanti says, to find the ability to string the small moments of joy together, which is what makes life bearable.
It’s cool to see what kinds of rugs strangers have in their apartments, you know? Like do you ever walk by a house and wonder what it looks like inside? Walking into someone’s place when you hardly know them is a cool chance to see what someone else lives like—what kinds of mugs they have. Don’t call me strange, it’s curiosity, and it’s been fulfilled for me!
We all need a new setting or a fresh perspective sometimes. Where’s somewhere you can go, even for a few minutes, to break you out of a pattern you’ve been in, a question you keep not finding answers to, an idea that isn’t serving you?
And even if you can’t find a stranger’s apartment like me, I’m sure you can find a new cafe down the street where the light comes through the window in a way you haven’t seen before. How can you surprise yourself by going somewhere different?
Sincerely,
Elly