Your Home Is Your Sanctuary
Image Credit: Paul Milinski
We’ve all been home for coming up on 14 months at this point and somehow are still finding ways to put renovating our space on the back burner. We are all guilty of it. The word renovate can come with a scarily daunting and expensive connotation, but it doesn't have to. Although it would be nice, you don’t have to gut your whole house in order to make your space feel more like you.
Think carefully about and explicitly define your intentions for your space.
We’ve been in the house for a long time. Your once spacious home might feel like it gets smaller by the day and the more you stare at your wall the more you ask yourself if that paint color was really that ugly when you picked it all those years ago.
Things are getting jumbled and it seems as if life has no rules anymore. Your office is now a fold up table in the windowless basement. Your child’s school is now your kitchen. Your bedroom is the last chance you have for an escape, but work seems to follow you there as well.
There’s never a sense of relaxation or logging off. That’s why it is so important to practice intention within your home. If your bedroom truly is the only place you can get some alone time, unwind, and take some deep breaths - then do everything you can to protect it.
It isn’t selfish, it’s self care.
Make an effort to designate it as a no work zone, or even a no electronics zone, if that makes it easier. Whatever you need to do to make sure that space is no longer serving 1,000 different purposes and instead creating a space where you can recharge in order to figure out what to do with the rest of your house.
Designate a working area
In an ideal world, working from home is inherently the same as being in the office, just without your colleagues. In the real world, working from home means a makeshift work station, your colleagues being replaced with family and friends who are all on their own different schedules, and an endless cycle of never truly feeling like you’re ‘off’ work. Your answering emails while making dinner and hopping on calls when you’re supposed to be doing the dishes or just relaxing and watching a movie.
Create a space within your home, wherever you want, and treat it as if you are going into the office every single day. Stick to a schedule but only do work when you are there. This at least gives the illusion of a separation of work and home and creates the sense of a break for yourself. Eventually when you sit down in this space each morning, you will feel a refreshed sense of diligence and focus rather than an increasingly overwhelming feeling of being burnt out.
Create mini routines
It’s hard to believe that we once used to wake up, go to the gym, come home and shower, put on a cute outfit and heels, do hair and makeup, take 2 trains, place a mobile Starbucks order, walk a couple blocks, pick up aforementioned Starbucks order, swipe a badge, ride the elevator (with about 15 other people…gasp!), swipe a badge again…and all before 8:30 AM.
That sense of disciplined routine now seems so foreign and kind of superficial. Nobody really had it all together but we were all pretty good at acting like we did. Our past selves would have never guessed we could do that all from our homes and in our pajamas and our future selves would never dare say that maybe we miss that kind of rigid routine just a little bit. Or basically just any sense of routine.
But the good news is is that nobody is stopping you from creating your own. Except, well, yourself. Get yourself into the flow of your day, even if it is an illusion, by establishing a consistent morning routine that works for you. Making a coffee at home can replace your Starbucks order (it was overpriced anyways) and skimming emails while doing so can replace the same skim you once did on the train. I doesn’t have to be glamorous or ‘aesthetic’ but just something that transitions you into the next stage of your day so you can create more of a barrier between the work and personal parts of your home.
Put your favorite things on display
I don’t care if your favorite thing is your pink pig stuffed animal from when you were 5 that is tattered and dirty and quite frankly, a little embarrassing now that you’re an adult. I don’t care as long as it makes you smile.
It sounds simple and a bit obvious, but make sure whatever material possessions you own that make you happy are on display all throughout your space. Whether it’s photos of friends and family, a band poster, a book, a candle, a plant, a painting. Anything you want as long as it feels like you’re sprinkling serotonin all around your place.
Treat yourself.
If you can afford it, buy that thing. You know what I am talking about because whatever it is for you already popped into your head and is probably open in an abandoned tab on whatever device you’re reading this on. That one thing you have always wanted for your home but never pulled the trigger on. You and your home have been the only consistency in this inconsistent time and you both deserve it.