On Walking, Work, and the Magic of a New Space
Hello dear readers! There are many more of you here in the beginning than I expected there to be, wow! Let’s do a quick intro, shall we?
I spend a lot of time thinking – nay, obsessing – over how I want my home to be constructed. I spend a lot of time cultivating spaces to look the way I want them to. I have daydreams of house parties and soirees and intimate gatherings. I think of my home, in its ideal, as an oasis, as the place not only where I rest, but the place where I can explore. Some of these thoughts are just about furniture, about what dish to serve or which painting should go next to which on a certain wall. But a lot of the time, they are thoughts that poke at deeper questions about home and the habits of home. This is how this first newsletter started, before I knew it to be a newsletter. I just thought I should transcribe the feeling I was having, about being so excited to move. And then I asked myself why that was, and we ended up both in the same place and somewhere different altogether. I think this is a good indicator of how this newsletter is going to function – more as a place of polished musings, a kind of exercise, of stretching, all focused around a broad topic I find myself consumed by.
I hope you remain interested in what I have to say, and I hope it maybe helps you ask yourself questions, if only to get to know yourself better.
I always get all these romantic ideas about homemaking, and they’re always strongest right before a move. I’ve moved in some fashion every year of my life since I was eighteen; sometimes across town, sometimes across the state, sometimes across the country. This time, I’m packing up my things (most of which are still trapped inside plastic bins stacked on top of each other in the garage, their flimsy lids bending under all that weight) into a little townhouse in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, MS.
A lot of things make me giddy about this move, even if I am moving into a “townhouse.” I despise the word townhouse. It conjures up for me the hastily constructed buildings in those little college villages with names like “The Retreat”, those places with vinyl floors and sleek chrome appliances that are inhabited by frat boys and furniture that feels like a showroom, something you shouldn’t rest your glass or feet on lest it collapse or disappear. I know because I used to spend a lot of time in these townhomes, many moons ago.
But I digress.
This will be the first time I live in Jackson proper, after a childhood growing up in the white flight suburbs that surround the city, the suburbs where everything is made of brick and stacked into strip malls and office buildings that have only shot up in the last ten years. It feels to me like a rite of passage to now be taking up space in Jackson, though I know the city is not “mine.” I would never claim it as “mine.” But this townhouse will be mine, and perhaps that is worth something.
To me, perhaps the most romantic pursuit of the whole thing is the fact that I will have a neighborhood, and that neighborhood has a name, and a neighborhood bar, and a neighborhood grocery store and neighborhood coffee shop. This has always been, to me, the most exciting part of “city living”. I think of Chicago or New York or L.A., cities so big their neighborhoods are like little cities themselves, with their own restaurants and grocery stores and architecture and culture. Say what you will about Jackson, but you can’t say it isn’t made up of its own distinct neighborhoods.
I’ve spent countless stolen minutes at work in Google Maps, obsessively charting the path from where I work to my new home to the little coffee shop to the Irish pub to the market where Eudora Welty used to shop. There is, to me, a romance in being able to walk somewhere to get what you need. I love the giddy anticipation of walking to a bar, the drunken stumbling of the slog home. I love the vision I have of myself weighted down with canvas totes filled with fresh fruit and cheese and Topo Chico and a bottle of wine. It feels big city to me. It feels Parisian. It feels like independence. It’s a stupid little romantic idea, but it makes me happy.
I also have this idea to take author photos in my new space, as a way to take ownership of it, and to mark what I see as a shift in my career. Or perhaps it’s more apt to say they would mark the “beginnings” of my career. Regardless, when I say “career”, I mean it. That is what my writing is, what I want it to be. I sort of see this new space as confirming that.
I picture myself sprawled on the hardwood floors I’m so excited about, wearing this slinky red dress I bought for a wedding before I remembered you can’t wear red to a wedding. I’m holding the phone I’ve dreamed about, the one that looks like a pair of red lips, which is another independent fantasy I have, having a landline that only good friends have the number to. My mouth is open and glossy, my eyes are toying with the camera. And then I picture that photo on the back cover, on the inside flap, of a book. “M.C. Smith lives in Jackson, MS with her cat, Barry Hannah.”
In my mind, this move is symbolic of me giving myself over to my writing, really dedicating myself to it, after many years of distracted pursuit. Maybe this isn’t where it begins exactly, but this is where I can start to focus, to take things more seriously.
My best friend Dalton, he worries, me connecting professional success with physical space. I worry about it too, if I’m being honest. I find myself falling into this trap of thinking quite a lot: “Once I’m in this phase of my life, things will be better. Once I have this one thing, this one product, once I’m in this space, life will be easier, things will flow more smoothly.” I bounced like this from college to a year of working to two years in Wyoming for an MFA, thinking with every shift, “This is when it gets easier. This is when I can get comfortable enough to really work.” It never really got that much easier, not during the first year I could finally live alone or the one year I had a dishwasher or any of the moves where I found a place with more “character”. There’s always something that makes it hard to work.
And now here I am. Home. A place I told myself I never wanted to come back to, at least not for a long time.
And now, having said that, maybe this time it is different, or it can be, if I try to make it so. I’m home in Jackson, and I’m happy about it. People ask me about that a lot, “Oh is it so terrible being back there, don’t you hate being back there.” And the answer is no. I don’t really. I can’t tell you why, but being here feels good. Right. It feels stable, with room for rest, but room for some excitement too.
And hey, things are stable, things are better, from a purely practical standpoint. I have a job that pays me well with benefits, something I have never had before. I despise the idea of a “side hustle” the “always grinding” mindset that capitalism has forced us into, but I have a little gig that makes me some extra money on the side. I know that I have a mental illness, and I mostly know how to deal with it. It is, for the moment, no longer all-consuming. I have people that want to spend time with me so I don’t have to spend every day trapped in my house, alone. I have, now, a townhouse to live in, a townhouse in good shape that looks like it will be well-maintained, that the landlord will answer me when my hot water is out or my faucet leaks or my ceiling caves in (though I don’t see those things happening, not in this apartment, thankfully). I have a plan for the next few years that I keep close to my chest and that I am actively working towards every day.
And yes, Dalton is right: you shouldn’t marry your professional success to your environment, to the space you’re in, otherwise you’ll always be waiting for things to be perfect before you can really get working. But worrying about over drafting every month, worrying about how I’m going to feed myself, working 60 hour weeks or spending every day in the same cocoon of loneliness, spending every day half drunk because it’s the only way I can find to relax, those things do make it hard to work. It’s ridiculous to say there’s a world in which they don’t.
So yes, I think this move into my own space in a city I’m getting to know again as an adult, I think that will make me productive, can mark a point of progression in me building my career as a writer.
What can I say? I’m choosing to be a little giddy, and to have a little hope, I guess.