The Furniture Epiphany

I turned twenty-six in January. Not a major birthday, really. It was on a Monday, and I celebrated by taking the day off work - I went to the gym, went to my favorite hamburger place for lunch and spent the afternoon watching episodes of House on DVD, and that was it. There were no profound differences in my life to mark this birthday - I've been in the same apartment in the same city now for over two years, had the same job for over three, and remain as single as I was the day I graduated from college. But I did wake up with the keen awareness of being closer to thirty than twenty, and with that came an epiphany of sorts: I'm a grown woman, but my surroundings don't reflect my real life. How did I realize this? I looked around and noticed:

Everything in my apartment folds.

OK, not everything. Just everything serving as a seat or bed. I had two mismatched futons (one serving as my bed and the other as a drastically less comfortable spare couch/guest bed), a cushioned butterfly chair, and two flimsy wooden folding chairs.

I've been out of college and in the workforce for five years, I have my own place, and I'm a homebody who spends a lot of time in my apartment; I need a home that reflects those facts or I'll never feel like this is my real life. Cheap, folding furniture doesn't just indicate that I work for a nonprofit or live in a small space; it implies that my residence here is a temporary thing. That I could pick up and go with little effort at any point. That I wouldn't care if I had to leave all my furniture in an alley or sell it for twenty bucks on Craigslist because it was no more intentionally chosen or arranged than dorm room furniture. It's been very easy to prolong a college-student mindset in my life, because I've moved a lot and thrown myself into the culture of the organization I work for. In a way, I stumbled into the job I'm doing now, and for a long time I just went with the flow, committing for the minimum possible time, feeling sure I'd be leaving and finding a new career just as soon as I magically figured things out. I didn't bother trying to make friends or date outside of work, since I thought I'd just be leaving anyway. And then I woke up and realized that I like my job, I like this city. and even if I don't know where I'll end up or what I'll do when I get there, I can still live my life here, now, as if this is it. That I should.

So on my twenty-sixth birthday I made a resolution to put down roots. I decided to be conscious of living my life rather than just waiting for the next milestone to pass. Before the month was over, I'd made my first step towards acknowledging my life as a grown-up: buying a chair. A real one. It's stylish, it goes with the colors I like and already have in my apartment, it has a matching ottoman, and best of all? It doesn't fold.