What home improvement shows have taught me about being human
My nomadic days have, for the time being, ended. I moved into my new loft a week ago, and I love the hip coziness and high ceilings in my new space. I especially love the fact that I don’t have to care about my pipes freezing or shoveling the snow that keeps falling.
The relief of not owning a house is palpable, and yet because we humans are notoriously complicated, I have also found myself succumbing to the siren call of home improvement shows lately. This habit started when I was sleeping on the floor in my old house because all my belongings had been packed inside a storage shed. In that state of flux, I kept getting pulled back to watching homes being torn apart and rebuilt.
A staple in these shows is addressing the foundation. This is more than just don’t put lipstick on a pig. This has to do with health and safety.
In our own lives, it’s easy to ignore the rotting beams and dank basements. Just like the past owners of those fixer-uppers, it’s tempting to quickly patch those places up with plaster, or hide them under some shag carpet, because the time and energy it takes to address something like that is significant, not to mention the cost.
The hosts of these shows reiterate time and again, if these things are not addressed, the issues will just grow bigger and more dire with time. It’s tempting to ignore these kinds of messages and shiplap the hell out of our lives, covering this, hiding that. In fact, our entire culture urges us to do this, but at what ultimate cost?
To be at home in our selves, to feel safe and grounded in the center of our being, can we brave the dank basements and get curious? What are the old and rotten things we are holding onto? What conditions are present that might lead to collapse?
It’s not only removing those things that matters. We also need to put strong and steady beams in place that will hold us up. What are the things that truly support us and our lives? How can we move those into place and build the rest of our days around those?
There’s something else that is ever-present in these shows—taking down walls and adding in windows.
What walls are cutting us off? How can we intentionally create ways to look at the world more and let the light pour in?
There are some messages we need to resist in these shows, though. The first is that an entire renovation can happen in 43 minutes. To return to a good state of repair, especially if the damage is extensive, requires time and intention. It means enlisting help—experts, friends, those who have your best interests at heart—and it demands patience. While destruction often only requires an instant, construction takes time. And effort. A daily waking up and grabbing the tools that build a solid and beautiful life.
We also need to be careful of chasing perfection, especially at the cost of our personality. One of the last boxes I unpacked in my new place contained items I display on a bookshelf in my bedroom. These are my holy items: pictures of my kids, stones I gathered from the Grand Canyon, a blue plastic anklet I found and wore during the worst of times.
When I returned these items to their place on the bookshelf in my new space, my attempt at a perfectly-styled bedroom suddenly didn’t belong in a magazine, it belonged to me. This might sound like a good thing—and it is—but this is exactly the point I’m trying to make. I literally almost packed everything back up, because I could imagine one of the hosts of these tv shows walking in and saying, “We’ll create more storage, so you can put these things away in order to create clean lines in here.”
Perfect houses create the same dangerous expectations as the idea of a perfect body or a perfect personality. All of the above are not only impossible to create, they are impossible to maintain. They also force us to hide what is unique and different, and dammit, I, for one, am tired of doing that.
May we all hold onto the holy and weird things that make us who we are. May we resist the pull to be perfect. May we practice growing curious, expansive, full of space and light. May going in feel like arriving Home, a place where the rule is you can be who you are and know you are loved, because there’s no better feeling than that.
Live light, y’all.