I aimed my ambitions toward milestones like paying off our debts and buying a house when what I wanted, deeply, was to feel confident, settled, at ease in my own life. The tangible things we put on a vision board or a prayer list usually represent a deep longing or fear worth examining and naming. I’d absorbed a nebulous definition of the good life, of what I thought I was supposed to want, and it obscured the good life I actually had. The countertops and screened-in porch I wanted would have brought new problems, with the same restlessness. But deeper than the “problems” of the creepy elevator, noise pollution, and archaic heating was the problem of my restless, unspecified desire.
If we’d found a way to move in that first year or two, I might have naively thought we’d solved the problem. I loved sitting on our couch in the evening, listening through the ceiling to my neighbor play piano. I loved watching the sky turn to cotton candy through my kitchen window while I did dishes. I loved knowing our campus postal workers by name. I loved the quaint picture rail in the dining room that I’d thought at first was a weird interpretation of crown molding. I hated the minute between hanging up and their knock on the door, embarrassed by the judgements I imagined them making upon entering the lobby.īut I loved walking in the lush park a block away, and walking a few blocks in the other direction to the Ashley River. I hated giving complicated directions over the phone when my friends inevitably got lost, since our building didn’t show up on Google maps. I hated feeling “behind” my new friends, who rented nicely decorated townhouses or owned their first homes. I hated sweating through my shirt anytime I turned off the blaring window AC unit in the summer for a few minutes of quiet. I hated hearing my neighbor’s industrial toilet flush overhead. I hated the predawn racket on the football field, whistles and chants stealing my REM sleep. I despised many things about the apartment for those first couple years. A couple months later, we would decide to aggressively pay down student loans, evaporating all discussion of moving. We talked briefly about trying to rent elsewhere, but couldn’t stomach the expense and stress of finding a place in a city we didn’t know. In this case, I could admit that I felt entitled and disappointed without becoming an entitled person, or letting my disappointment harden into bitterness. Well, here’s a lesson in adulthood on the house: you don’t have to let your feelings define you. It’s never a good look, to feel like you’re owed something, but the feeling is visceral, and often blindsiding. Then? Then I am filled with disproportionate rage because I felt I deserved that time. The same thing happens to me on a small scale now when I am patient and nurturing with Betsy all morning, and then she doesn’t nap or wakes up early. I thought I’d earned some undefined reward, working at a tedious job in a city where I felt displaced and lonely for our first years of marriage while Mike finished grad school. After some (metaphorical) unpacking (which took a lot longer than unpacking our IKEA furniture) I realized the feeling I hated but couldn’t deny was entitlement. My self-pitying, disappointed reaction embarrassed me, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to hide it from Mike. “Expectations often coast under our radar, making themselves known only after they have bombed something we had high hopes for into rubble.” In Rising Strong, Brené Brown uses the phrase “stealth expectations” to describe things we don’t realize we expected until we’re crushed by disappointment when those expectations aren’t met:
The next morning, we would be shocked awake by what appeared to be a UFO landing but was in fact floodlights illuminating the football field that doubled as our backyard.
#The tyranny of terrazzo windows#
The large windows in every room, which I would come to love, allowed just enough light in the day’s waning hours to cast an eerie pallor. We unlocked the creaking front door and surveyed dirty wood floors, peeling paint, a rusted bathroom sink. Strings had been pulled to get us this apartment, and the timing wasn’t ideal in that the former tenant had moved out (after 20 years) hours before our arrival. The alarm bells in my mind got louder when we stepped into the ancient elevator.
The move was a whirlwind, and I didn’t think twice about the apartment until we pulled up in front of its institutional looking exterior. We had no savings, but the new job doubled our income from the previous year, and offered another perk: campus housing. Mike and I had been married for almost three years (long enough to still be amateurs, but with the hubris to think otherwise) when we moved cross country for his first career track job.
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