It Started With a Corner

For a long time, I blogged from my couch, laptop precariously balanced on a pillow teetering on my knees.

Inevitably, my eyes wandered to the television, DVR’d episodes of Gossip Girl, episodes of Law & Order I’d seen seventeen times, reality shows I should be embarrassed to admit to watching (Dance Moms, I’m talking about you.)

Idly, I clicked open a few blogs I meant to read earlier in the day. 

Checked my e-mail. 

Pinned pretties.  (And if you don’t know what that means, you’re better off.  Your to-do list will thank you for not opening a Pinterest account.) 

Finally made it back to my patiently waiting blog posts, my train of thought lost somewhere along my path of distraction.

I began to covet the immortalized necessity of Virgina Woolf – a room of one's own*.

I can see this room.  Cozy and feminine.  White furniture and frilly touches, peppered with optimistic shades of turquoise and yellow.  Delicate toile fabric. 

Absolutely unlike any of the rooms in my actual home, a home filled with vibrant, saturated colors, espresso wood, neutral décor.  A home I love.  A home filled with love and laughter and endless diversions.

A home that doesn’t have a spare room for Ryan and I to share an office, let alone for each of us to have our own, no matter how many ideas I might lust after on Pinterest.

Still, blogging on the couch was lulling me into a comforting vortex of wasting time. 

I needed something more.

As we discussed moving things around, creating a playroom space in the basement, I turned my eye to a corner in our living room, a corner housing a brightly colored dollhouse.  

Yet behind the dollhouse, I saw something more.  Built-in shelves.  The open staircase that snagged my heart the very first time we entered our house.

Potential.

Carefully, I purged and organized the toys so that they would fit into two of the four baskets remaining in our living room. 

Wistfully, I put aside my idea of an ideal writing space. 

Practically, I realized that I was building a for-now space, a stepping stone of sorts, a place to write towards my goals and my dreams.

Thanks to a particularly engaging episode of Sid the Science Kid, I managed to put together a sleek desk, the espresso color blending perfectly into our living room. 

Actually, it took an episode of Sid and the majority of Sesame Street.  Abbey and Dylan were in a state of television Nirvana.  There were four thousand and three parts in that one little box!

My dream room is tucked away, waiting for a day when I can paint and furnish and lose myself for more than the stolen moments when the kids are safely ensconced in their beds.

For now I have a corner.  

It still needs to be cultivated, decorated with small bits of me.  I need a chair, so that I don't have to drag my dining room chair over to my desk each night.  But for now I have a corner.

And it’s enough.

My room of my own.

For now…

 *I realize I have oversimplified Woolf's idea of a room of one's own.  I don't mean to disrespect her ideas or the struggles that women writers faced in her time, but I honestly think my little corner will be beneficial as I move down my writing path, wherever it may lead.

How have YOU lived the Just Be Enough feeling this week?

Write a post, or link up a post you've already written, about how you felt comfortable, powerful, or content in your own skin recently.  

Just Be Enough is teaming up with Bellflower Books and Crickett's Answer for Cancer to bring beautiful memory books to women fighting breast cancer.  For every 20 linked stories, Bellflower Books will donate a $75 gift certificate to a woman and her family to create a twenty-page memory book.  The families will be chosen through Crickett's Answer for Cancer.  Our goal at Just Be Enough is to provide ten families with one of these books.  The campaign will continue for two more weeks, and we are currently very close to our third book!  

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