The (My) Desk

I am eating a slice of bread. It is good. I am hungry.

In three sentences, I communicated my current situation: eating bread. The words flowed naturally, unlike the words I have been trying to summon this evening. Words to describe how I feel, and have been feeling for a while. The perfect word that encapsulates angst, unease.

Thus is the life of the anxious. Incomplete, and jarring.

This evening, a recurring thought came to mind: my desk is not quite right. It is not good enough.

What does that mean, anyway? To be good enough.

I am a writer. Writers have busy desks, right? A connection to their place of work. I aspire for my desk to be my friend, for we will spend so long together. But I have been unable to make that connection. I am next to my desk almost every day, but the environment feels distant.

Thus, I think my desk should be different. I seek warmth. But I am unsure how to make my desk feel like the extension of me that I suppose it ought to be.

Perhaps my desk should be like one of the pretty, styled photos I have seen of desks on the internet. Or perhaps my desk should be busy, with landmarks that visually proclaim: I am productive. I ask: Am I really creative if I do not have a desk strewn with papers?, at the same time as wondering: Can I focus without a clean workspace? Can I be a writer, that which sustains me intellectually, emotionally, financially?

I know, deep down, my creative capacity – my ability to come up with ideas, and bring them into reality – is not so influenced by what is on my desk; whether barren or busy, I can work. The objects on my desk should not be important, but why do they feel so? I have no particular attachment to what is on there right now: two reference books, an iPad I seldom use, an empty juice box carton from yesterday’s breakfast, today’s water glass. Something should be different. Where are the mementos? My fingerprints?

When I was a child, I would collect stickers and put them on my wardrobe and desk. To have a decorated desk was gratifying. With every sticker, the desk was my own. As I grew up, my sentiments changed. To be professional – the aspiration of my 15-year-old self – was to have a clean desk. A desk with few possessions. The fewer the objects, the better. A clear desk begets a clear mind.

Then I grew up and moved away. I started with an almost empty room with few things of my own inside. Then, gradually, I tried to make the place my own. I purchased this desk, and the objects on it. I amassed things in no particular order, without aim or curation. The culmination of incremental change as I found new interests.

Every object has a tale: the coffee brewer I bought on impulse, the CO2 monitor I bought to better understand the air quality in my room, the laptop on which I have written countless words (Can a computer be a friend?). My collection never felt quite right, though – as if what I had made was not complete. The desk is occupied, but devoid of character. Where are the memories?

My eyes tear up.

A space, curated, is an illusion, like the simplicity of my opening salvo about bread. The bread was good. I was hungry. But that was only part of the picture. I did not tell you about my wet hair, from my shower taken minutes previous. Or of my various anxieties of the day, which taunted me as I ate – indeed, for longer: throughout all my waking hours.

Worrying if I turned the taps off. Realizing I have had this worry for a year. (Is it officially a compulsion if you have been doing something obsessively – checking taps – for a year?). My introduction left only the superficial. What I wanted you to know, rather than what you really needed to know to evaluate the situation.

Bread is bread, until I say how eating the bread made me recall the stressful, dark times when I ate countless cookies in a day to get by. The bread was my energy, without which I could not burn the midnight oil for one more night. (It is always one more night.)

I have a fear of being attached to my current place. What if I have to move because my landlord decides that they are selling the property, and the desk doesn’t work wherever I move? What of the desk and the time I invested in finding the one decoration that is just right? In arranging and rearranging, finding a groove as I do. I will be left only with memories; that moment in history, sealed.

With every customisation, the prospects for sadness grow – there will be more memories made, and thus more memories to look back on with a sense of loss when I inevitably move. With a quiet desk, I will have few memories of it. With a busy desk, I may recall the times of working hard at a desk next to my favourite things, picking something up as a distraction while I was thinking about the next paragraph to write.

Too many moments have already gone the way I envision my desk to go: they have become memories, frozen in time. Childhood, adolescence. Pets, family outings. Now I am an adult, whose formative stories have mostly been written. Pondering how my past was deceptively hurtful. A palace where the floors are paved with pillows, interspersed with concealed and sharp Lego bricks.

What is missing from my desk?

My desk was once my anchor: a place in which I was myself. Or was that an illusion? For at the time when my desk had nothing but the essentials – a keyboard, a computer, and a screen propped up by a book covered in coffee to save my neck from pain in long writing sessions – I was not who I am now. I didn’t know who I was. Maybe I still don’t.