[Vol. 21] What the 2067 Taught Me
Growing pains in Harlem.
Welcome back to That’s Gay, a candidly queer newsletter for a candidly queer world (cheers to that 😉 🥂), written by me, Till Kaeslin.
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Hi everyone!
So, I’ve moved. I’ve moved! It’s official and I’ve dropped my bags in my new apartment 😊
Moving has been … hectic. To say the least. Adjusting to the new space was more than I thought it would be – especially after coming in from being home out in Connecticut for the weekend (things move at a different pace there).
But somewhere between the McDonald’s Big Mac I ate while watching the Sex and the City movie for the umpteenth time last night and straining to hang up my string lights in my still-barren living room, I survived.
So dramatic – but you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the drama, now would ya 😉
Anyways, all I’ve been able to think about for the past few days is unpacking boxes and finding a place to put those boxes (Spoiler alert: Their empty husks are still sitting in my living room), so I’m going to keep today’s newsletter short and sweet.
Here’s “What the 2067 Taught Me” –
Sometimes, when you have a big event coming up that you’re looking forward to, you forget to appreciate the current moment; to honor everything it’s giving you as you’re living it.
Conversely, it’s a lot easier to look back on the past once you’ve moved on and gotten into that appreciative spirit –
1) because we tend to be wayyy more optimistic in hindsight.
2) because, if you’re anything like me, you get super sentimental when change starts blowing its winds your way.
Now that I’ve officially moved, the 2067 (what I’ve just now come to affectionately call my old apartment in Harlem) deserves one of those “in hindsight” look-back moments.
I went through it in the 2067.
And, chances are, you went through it in whatever apartment/house you called your own this past year, too.
If you’re a New Yorker, or live in an apartment anywhere in a big city, you might well know what I mean when I say that my mentality towards my apartment was always simply, “this is where I drop my things and go to sleep”. I never really thought of my apartments as “homes” so much as I did “rest stops” – somewhere I could go to escape the craziness of the city between working at cafes and being jostled around on the subway.
When the pandemic hit, everything changed.
*ok, how badass does that sentence sound? Sounds like I’m in a trailer for a zombie movie. Unreal.
All of a sudden, my apartment wasn’t a rest stop, it was my everything. It was where I worked, where I ate, where I had happy hour drinks with virtual company – I mean everything.
When you do everything like that in one place, the space suddenly becomes filled with unspoken thoughts – far too many to count, until they’re bouncing off the walls all around you.
The 2067 is where I truly came out to myself.
With nowhere for those thoughts to escape to, I couldn’t help but pay them their long overdue attention as they refused to stop bouncing and ricocheting all over the place (trust me, I tried to dodge them, but there’s not a lot of room in a Manhattan apartment to fake right).
So, with painful and labored steps, I grew. I grew big time.
I learned to open up about things I’d begun to think I would never open up about, I accepted that who I was was not only beyond my ability to change but something that I could actually love and be loved for, and I pushed myself to open all that up to my small corner of the world via a little, biweekly newsletter.
With a heart lighter than when I put inc on paper to sign that one year lease in 2020, totally ignorant to the fact that the world would shut down just two weeks later, I’m here now to say goodbye to the 2067.
It’s crazy to me how you can walk in the door being one person and walk out another. Who will I be when I walk out the door of this new apartment? Who will you be when you walk out of yours?
I guess only time will tell.
Today’s discussion Q:
What has your space taught you this past year, if anything?
You’ve heard my answer. Let me know yours in the comments below! As always, I’ll be reading/responding to all.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 21. See you in Volume 22, folks!
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Oooof, my apartment has taught me so much. I moved here in May 2020 completely on foot—as in, I walked everything here from my last apartment in a little 4-day parade with the help of a dolly and some suitcases. This is my first time living alone, after sharing an apartment with a boyfriend for a year, so I would say the biggest lesson has been independence. Enjoying, and preferring my own company, and occasionally that of my cat, Judy. And we must have a good thing going because yesterday, for the first time, I renewed a lease! That will be what I celebrate with my friends once I’m able to get the vax.