I Stopped Counting the Houses at Thirty

By the time the number of times I had moved matched my age, I was thirty.

That was when I stopped counting.

People like to talk about moving as a fresh start. A new beginning. A chance to reinvent yourself. Try doing it every year. Sometimes two or three times.

Eventually, starting over stops feeling hopeful and starts feeling like a way of life. Home becomes wherever you happen to land, and you learn not to get too attached to the idea that anything—or anyone—is going to stay. Even yourself.

Maybe you know that feeling even if you never moved thirty times. One day you look around and realize the life you built fits a version of you who is no longer entirely there.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had been to at least eight different schools. From the outside, I probably looked like a force to be reckoned with. Stubborn. Angry. Unruly. There was nothing you could tell me that I didn’t already think I knew.

Inside, of course, was another story.

I was scared. Hurt. Confused. And every time we landed somewhere new, I had to figure out who I was going to be there.

What version of me would work in this place? How much could I show? What would make people leave me alone? What might make them like me? But the gift in this was that I really started not to care about any of those questions the longer time went on.

But the moving ritual itself never changed: pack as much as you could into as little as you could. Land somewhere new. Set up camp.

No one really knew how long we would be there or when we might have to leave again, but while we were there, I needed some small part of it to feel like mine.

So I unpacked the boxes every time. I shared a bedroom with my sister, but I claimed my half. I arranged my things. I taped pictures to the walls and made collages out of places I wanted to go, things I wanted to have, and versions of myself I imagined I might someday become.

I took whatever had survived the move—old photographs, scraps, hand-me-downs, leftover pieces of things—and made something out of them.

I didn’t have language for any of this then. But I think I was building evidence that I existed beyond whatever was happening around me.

I couldn’t control where we lived. I couldn’t control how long we stayed. I definitely couldn’t control what happened inside the house.

But I could decide where my things went.

I could make one little corner look like me. Or at least look like the person I hoped might eventually be me.

I think we all do some version of this. We arrange the shelf. Hang the photograph. Keep the chair. Paint the wall. Sometimes we are not decorating at all. We are leaving little clues for ourselves about who we are.

Maybe that was the first time I learned that a room could do more than hold your belongings.

It could hold you.

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Years later, I ended up painting worlds for a living.

Scenery. Sets. Rooms that needed to convince you they had existed long before you walked into them. Places that might only be there for a day, or a week, or until somebody yelled, “Wrap!” and we tore the entire thing apart.

Which, now that I think about it, was probably a very logical career choice for someone who had spent half her life becoming emotionally attached to temporary structures.

I knew how to make a place believable. I had been practicing forever. What I wouldn’t know yet was that I had also been practicing something else.

Ten years ago, after Patrick died, I emptied my house. Not because I wanted a different house. Because I had absolutely no idea who lived there anymore.

I knew the person I had been before him. I knew who I had been with him. But the person without him? TBD, my friends.

So I did what, apparently, I have always done when I don’t know where I am. I started moving things. Actually, first I got rid of almost everything.

Looking back now, I wish I had made a time-lapse of that house over the next ten years. It would probably explain me better than I could.

The house went from stuffed full of things to almost empty and then, slowly, full again.

At one point, there was basically a rug and a yoga mat in the living room.

For a while, I turned the entire living and dining room into my paint studio, which I loved until I realized I had created a place to make things but nowhere to actually sit down and rest.

The couch was gone. That couch had belonged to the life Patrick and I had together, and every time I looked at it, I remembered him sick. It had cancer all over it. It stopped being furniture. It became a place I had to revisit every time I walked into the room. So I tossed it. Because what is the use of trying to be happy when what you are looking at is just making you sad?

For years, the house kept changing. I feel like it went from a home to a prison, keeping all the sadness in with no way out. Then a prison into an empty space where I could sort out those feelings. And when I was ready, it went from a space to a studio where I could create something new of myself. A storage unit for various versions of myself.

And then, eventually, I bought another couch.

A proper couch.

That sounds like a ridiculously ordinary thing to mark as progress, but grief has a strange way of making ordinary things enormous. A couch meant I expected to sit somewhere. Maybe rest. Maybe have people over. Maybe stay awhile.

I could practically date different versions of myself by photographs of the rooms. Here was the woman who needed everything gone. Here was the woman who needed to create. Here was the woman who could tolerate a few things coming back.

Here was the woman who could finally sit down.

And somewhere during those ten years, I began to realize I wasn’t just decorating. I was trying to answer a question. The question I thought I was answering was:

How do I become myself again?

Except that actually wasn’t the question at all. Because you don’t become yourself again. Not completely. Life doesn’t always give you that option. Sometimes something happens, and the old way of being simply doesn’t work anymore.

A big change like death, marriage, kids, or nothing dramatic at all can elicit being lost. You just wake up one day and realize the life around you was assembled by a version of you who isn’t entirely here anymore.

And then what?

I think I have been answering that question with rooms since I was a kid. Back then, I taped pictures to my half of a bedroom because I needed some evidence of a future.

After Patrick died, I emptied a house because I needed enough blank space to discover one. Same instinct. Different room. Same way of interpreting a life, different decade.

It also explains something about the work I have always been drawn to.

Yes, I can paint a wall, design a set, move furniture around, build an entire imaginary world, or take apart a room and put it back together differently.

But, for me, the interesting part was never really making things pretty.

I’ve spent most of my life watching what happens when people—and places—have to become something else.

I’ve done it professionally. I’ve done it personally. I’ve done it badly. And I’ve done some truly weird shit! But I know the territory. I have mapped out this terrain and set flags along the way.

Because I know we leave evidence everywhere.

Not just in dramatic things. In ordinary things. In what we keep, what we move, what we avoid, and what suddenly starts bothering us for reasons we cannot quite explain. Sometimes our spaces reveal the change before we do.

In the couch we cannot stand to look at anymore. In the boxes we keep moving from house to house without opening. In the room that somehow became storage instead of a spare room. In the photographs still taped to a wall. In the empty corner. In the thing we finally bring back.

I spent years thinking I was trying to make myself feel at home in a place.

I wasn’t.

I was trying to figure out how to feel at home in myself, even when I kept changing.

Funny enough, I stopped counting the houses at thirty.

I’m still counting the versions of me.

Ten Years of One Living Room

Almost 15 years ago, we moved into this house. The photo on the left is