Romancing Reality
Holistic Housekeeping Mini Newsletter, March 2025
PLAYING HOUSE
FICTIONALIZE YOUR LIFE
Although I adore the trend of “romanticizing your life,” I prefer to fictionalize my life instead. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, but it became a mental health lifeline while I was in college. Despite being (inconsistently) Type A, brilliant, and educationally well equipped, I barely made it through school because of shitty boyfriends and severe depression and social anxiety. So I started playing pretend.
I would go to the library to study and “pretend to be a college student.” I would get into the role through my clothes, the ritual of setting up shop at my favorite table, an exaggerated emotional state of either stressful studious ardor or passionate intellectual fervor. I leaned into the identity of the role to make it feel like my life was a story I could escape into rather than a hell I wanted to escape from.
It worked. I graduated with a distinction in my department, and I continued to play house throughout every major change and stage in my life going forward. I looked to the background of television shows and movies for inspiration for the foreground of my real life; the set design, the cohesive costume wardrobe of each character, the way on-screen cars always had a perfectly cleared out trunk to haul paper bags of groceries stuffed with fresh produce and flowers and generic off brand pantry staples. Why not? Why not insist on paper over plastic, not because they are better for the environment, but just because they are more delightful to interact with? Why not buy fresh produce for the beauty rather than the health? Why not insist on a bouquet of flowers resting in my front seat every time I ran errands in town?
At the peak of fictionalizing my life, I obsessively collected secondhand floral April Cornell dresses to cosplay the housewife. I was bored out of my mind as a stay-at-home mom, and I thought turning up the dial on the performance art of motherhood would allow me to seek or create the fun I believed it would be as a kid. Every day, I put on a floral dress and apron. I completed my housekeeping routine. I perfected my household management lists. I allowed the housewife to possess me.
With time, the boundary between fantasy and reality began to bleed and become a life that feels like my own. A life that I don’t always love, but that I sometimes love. A life where I don’t easily forget the impact of my creative capacity.
Mark Twain wrote: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.” — Mark Twain
Fictionalizing my life puts me in contact with possibility without detaching me from reality. Slowly but surely, I grow to accept life for what it is: beautiful and terrible. My own. My own. My own.
Ready to make the daydream a reality?
You know that feeling of returning home to a clean, tidy, beautiful space?
That feeling where you turn the key, open the door, step through the threshold, and your WHOLE BODY sighs into a deep exhale of relief?
I want you to have that moment, to have the feeling, every time you walk into your home.
If you’re ready to make this daydream a reality and reclaim your home from the clutter, you can commit to a Stay the Course Package to ensure you bring the process all the way to completion.
Some Newsletter Housekeeping
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