New Year, New Desk

 One of my new year's resolutions was to finally acquire an ergonomic desk and chair. My sweet, adorable, International Orange (the official color of Golden Gate Bridge) desk and wooden kitchen chair were precious but my ever-aging body that regularly hoists a 35-pound toddler about gave notice. 

OLD

NEW

I wrote my old desk a love letter, and set it out on the  street for swift adoption. My new desk is glorious. We have a lot of goodness ahead together, I can tell. More words, less back pain.

LOVE LETTER TO MY ORANGE DESK

We have been together for more than ten years. You arrived, used, in Tiffany blue. I shellacked you in International Orange, the official color of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

You helped me write entire novels. I finished High Turnover with you. Started and finished Invincible People. And started and nearly finished The Clinic with you. Novels still waiting to find their place in the world, but that is not your fault. I clocked countless journal hours, blog posts, social media posts, morning pages, short non-fiction, letters first to my eggs, then my embryos, then to Beatrix. So many words were written on top of your inviting surface.

I also used you to hold up my breast pump so the babe could be fed while I escaped. I held each cat on my lap while writing. Your drawers have held tax records. Scads of collected to-do lists which have been done but I can’t seem to part with yet, their record of my life just as sacred to me as my journals. Pens, so many pens. Stamps. The archive of Christmas cards sent. Art supplies. Reading glasses. A sweet felt sloth hung from the desk lamp until it was adopted by Bea, then lost. 

You’ve been amazing. But my body has outgrown you. You were never the right height, especially paired with a crap kitchen chair for this decade of time together. A masseuse, my GP, and now my physical therapist look at me quizzically: why don’t I yet have an ergonomic desk situation? 

Tomorrow I turn 46. And my new desk arrived yesterday. Not yet assembled. A box full of pure potential. A desk to finish my current novel on. To finish my coaching certification from. To start a coaching business with. A standing desk. With buttons that will attract my child to futz with it endlessly. 

The orange desk’s drawers are now emptied, a decluttering of the mind at play as well. I will set you out on the sidewalk with a sign that says “Free, and adorable.” Maybe I’ll leave the leftover can of International Orange paint out too, for the Tiffany blue that bleeds through at the well-worn forearm spot. I give it a half hour before you are adopted.

Behind the scenes with my construction crew:

What will you gift yourself this year in support of all the beautiful things you are trying to accomplish?