Imagine you own a large house. It’s a charming, old place with many rooms and decent-enough bones. Not stately, but attractive in its old-world, banged-up way, and historically significant to its neighborhood. Now imagine that—as in a hazy Stevie Nicks music video dream sequence complete with gauzy fabrics, silver bangles, and skeleton keys—you breathlessly try every door, but you can’t gain access to most of its rooms. They remain locked, secret; you stand dejectedly by. You’re the mistress of this domain, but you’re also the interloper.
This is the life of a landlady.
This is my life.
I have chosen to own a complicated home.
Over many years of gazing at closed doors, I’ve stopped worrying so much about what might be behind them. In the interest of my mental health, I’ve categorically stopped trying to fix whatever might be wrong back there. If I catch a whiff of rankness emanating from behind a closed door, I do not obsess over the piles of crusty socks, stale cigarette butts, and elderly pizzas that probably caused it. I just go to my own little cluster of rooms, burn some Palo Santo, put caulk on something, and live my own damn life.
I’ve worked for years to come to this point of blissful, possibly counterproductive detachedness. I’m countering my natural state in doing so—a default setting that for years had me worrying over every little creak and every little crack. But no matter how diligently I try to disengage, I still occasionally awaken at 4:00 a.m., adrenaline pumping, with the certainty that the house is literally crashing down around me.