art frames, never hung
on endlessly procrastinating the simplest tasks
A few months ago, after the movers finally cleared out, and I was alone in the new apartment for the first time, I began to clear out the piles of boxes that had filled the bedroom. I sliced the wrapping tape with a butterknife, pulled out the random collections of glasses, mugs, t-shirts, cords, smashed old phones, lone socks separated from their pair, one by one. Once the boxes were gone, and the cardboard flattened, I began to assemble the bed frame, re-screw my desk, build the bookshelves, tighten the legs on the desk chair, lay down my blue rug that has hopped from one apartment and city to the next.
At first, everything was deliberate. Each little item had its place, each book had its right order on the wire shelves, each plant had its measured spot on the window ledge where it would get just the right amount of direct sunlight each morning.
But then the frenzied pace slowed. My job picked up. The humidity and temperature shot through the roof. I looked at my bank statement one day, saw all the red, and decided that I was going to be fiscally responsible and stop buying those extra succulents and tropical plants (yeah, right). But still, there were two piles of things that I hadn’t gotten through. The first was a collection of random shit that I either loved and didn’t know where to put or was protecting from a craigslist fire sale: a pasta drying rack, porcelain bowls for French onion soup, old blankets, mangled copies of a magazine that I couldn’t get rid of (because I was going to read it in the future! Absolutely!).
But then there loomed a second pile. While unpacking the boxes, I had separated out all the art and prints that I have stashed away over the years, with ambitious plans to fill the blank walls with frames, grid-patterned prints, hand-built free-hanging shelves for plants and tchotchkes a la Pinterest. I piled everything in the corner, under a spot by the window where I’d have to see it each day, just so I knew that there was no escaping it. It would only take the right moment, and then ‘boom’: it would be all up there, on the walls, all in perfect alignment. And then, finally, everything would be settled. And I could move on with my life.But as I was first writing this, three or four months later, at the tail-end of summer and the onset of autumn, I looked up from my desk, and it was unavoidable: most of the white walls were bare, blindingly white, and against the corner wall it was still there, this demon peeking out and leering at me.
The stack of art that I had never hung.
My suspicion is that there are two types of people: those who hang the art, and those who don’t. You know what type I am.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who bundles up good ideas, and then never acts on it. During college, I’d buy (or get gifted) ornate leather-bound journals and notebooks, all for lecture notes or my own projects, yet I’d end up furiously typing notes last-minute onto my laptop anyway, and leave those journals untouched for months, years (most of them are still empty). And when I think of it now, each place that I have lived in has had some version of the un-hung art: plants on the fire escape completely un-watered, lumber never hung as shelves, day planners and wall calendars never marked, candles never lit, bottles never drank.
But then there are also those other people. The people who ‘do’ the thing. They flutter about in the world, lighting the candles, filling the calendars, actually cooking the recipes from their recipe books, reading the books that they buy on sale, completing the long projects and tasks not at the last minute but day by day, a little bit at a time. I do not understand these people. I know that they exist, but I don’t get how. They are entirely imperceptible to me: they’re living in the same world, but it does not feel like it. They are Venus, and I am not even Mars but a black hole, where the simplest tasks stretch into infinity and house-bound projects go to die. There’s that word I both loathe and embrace: procrastinator. The term you either are, or aren’t, and which I certainly have been.
My procrastination had gotten so bad this time around that I decided to procrastinate by learning about procrastination. It was some small part of me, perhaps, that was morbidly fascinated by my inability to hang a print of Van Gogh on the wall. I was sucked into the algorithmic void of youtube, the sucker that I am for shiny ted-talks, infographics, and videos that are about 60% too long. I watched self-helpy YouTubers talk all about their 4:30 a.m. wakeups, their cold showers, their mindfulness techniques, and their note-taking software. Then I began to read: psychology articles, research papers, listicles, and tweets (too many tweets).
I did all of this, of course, except for hanging the art. Many psychologists supposedly believe that procrastination stems from not enjoying the task at hand. By procrastinating, according to them, we’re protecting ourselves from activities that are or at least seem harmful. But I knew that wasn’t it for me. All the time, I procrastinate joyful tasks (such as writing!) with dishes, sweeping the floors, and scrubbing the toilet bowl (hardly enjoyable!).
Supposedly a serial slacker can’t look past the short-term benefits of, say, binging another season of It’s Always Sunny as opposed to decorating a house. The procrastinating brain is always opting to be a little happier. But its sense of happiness is distorted, uneven, and susceptible to the dopamine hits that we get from scrolling Twitter, as opposed to the satisfaction that comes from finishing a task that we know will add something meaningful to our lives.
But even as I skimmed, watched, scrolled, and binged more self-help videos and listicles, none of their answers stuck. Nothing was.
Procrastination (the word) is derived from the Latin ‘procrastinare’ – meaning to put off until tomorrow. There’s another root word of the term: Akrasia, which is Greek for ‘doing something against our better judgment’. It’s acting in a way that I know is unhelpful, and against my self-interest, yet still doing. As Dr. Piers Steel, a psychologist, said when describing procrastination: “It’s self-harm.”
On a quiet day, when work had ended, I scooched across the hardwood floor in my desk chair to the corner. I hadn’t touched the pile of art since I had moved, not even when vacuuming or dusting. There was a film of grime along the frames, cobwebs stretching to the floor. When I jostled one of the frames a small spider scuttled away. It was September, and even though the pile hadn’t been touched since June, it somehow looked larger, heavier, like it would take some sword-in-the-stone feat of willpower and strength just to lift the first piece.
I thought about something that I read while procrastinating about procrastination. Thomas Schelling, a psychologist, writes about what he has coined ‘the divided self’. Instead of thinking of ourselves as singular and ‘unified’ beings, he argues that each of us has many different selves within us, “jostling, contending, and bargaining for control”. We contain the selves that are productive, diligent, timely with homework assignments, and always on schedule, but also those selves that lose track of time, meander around their responsibilities, never take the straight path ahead — if any path at all. If we all have those split selves, then boy do I ever. It would help explain how we, and I, can be so joyously happy and fulfilled in one moment, and so lost and strung out in the next.
There isn’t anything so incredible in the collection of art that I have, admittedly. There’s no theme or genre, or what people would call a ‘color story’. There are a few prints of famous art that I like: Van Gogh, Renoir, Hokusai, a picture of a street in Belfast, postcards of Slovak embroidery patterns, a landscape of Colorado at sunset. There isn’t any clear theme or throughline that connects the pieces. Anyone with style would decide to hang a few of them, but then closet the rest.
Every piece, even the dullest of them, had stories that I’d let slip from my mind, and it wasn’t until I was there, touching them, that the memories began to trickle back. A painting of a rock in Oregon that an old friend made. A diploma that carries four years of history (and debt), a diploma I used to hang in my home but then kept closeted away in my last place. Some photographs that a friend took of us as we wandered around in my old neighborhood: open lawns, oak trees colored yellow and red in the Autumn. A print that a former partner, and friend, framed for me, and gave to me in the middle of a crowded kitchen in a city apartment, which I later hung in the kitchen, and have always hung in the kitchen since, along with the grease stains and smoke that’s now caked onto the frame.
So many of us are steeped in a zeitgeist of endless possibilities, and constant self-reimagining. The well-curated, tasteful, and chic gallery wall signals something about who we are, and want to be; put-together, worldly, and of the times. But all this art in the corner is irreconcilable with those aspirations. My art was a stark reminder of the past, of memories that are always shifting like tectonic plates, some closer and more alive, unmistakable, raw, alongside those that have atrophied, and calloused over. And nothing about this collection of art is innately beautiful. The colors don’t mesh. The aesthetics don’t hold up. But neither does life. The things of life don’t align like a Pinterest gallery wall. Life is cobbled together, haphazard, full of threads that end, and stories that trail off. There are very few sharp corners and clear-cut endings. The selves that we struggle with shift and contort. The modern striving for the perfect décor will always fail, just as expecting perfection from ourselves will always fall short.
At what point, and how, do we get rid of the voice inside of us that seeks perfection in all things? How do we press send on the piece while knowing that it won’t quite be perfect? How do we fill those spaces on the walls, even when we know that it won’t fill everything that we want?
Sometime last week I ended my day at work, shut the laptop, picked a piece of art, examined it, and then laid it out on the bed, one by one, until the full length of my white sheets was covered in dozens of prints, and frames, and memories from 29 years. One by one, a nail drove into the wall, followed by a frame, and then pins holding up postcards, and command strips unstripped and then re-stripped, before pressing the frames firmly into the plaster walls. Slowly the blank space began to fill. I wasn’t even thinking, or balancing in my head where I thought one piece or the other should go to match: I was merely filling up space. All these months, the thought of hanging even one piece had been torturous. But now, there was nothing to it. If inertia had sucked me into not doing anything for weeks and months, then this was the polar opposite: a force of energy wildly going, gravity thrusting and controlling all movement, everything guided by sheer momentum.
That’s what everyone says to do, when something earth-shattering has happened to you – something that you know, even in the moment, will alter your life: Keep moving. Don’t stop. Just keep going.
There I was. Going.
And I only stopped when I thought I had reached the end. I looked around the room, and the art was up, as if by magic. This was it, I thought. This will fix everything. Since all of the art was up, so were the memories, and the stories. Now that they were seeing the light, I could finally move past them, and on with my life: into the work, and into the next chapter where new art slowly accumulates and drowns out the past. I sat in my chair, poured some rum into a glass, and sipped. I’ve earned this, I thought. The art was up. Now everything would be fine.
I reached for my phone, took a picture, and laid back in my chair and admired it. I did this. And thought of who to send it to. But no one came to mind. All of these pictures, and stories, and still there were no names, no faces.
Even with all the art, and all the memories, it was still there: the loneliness, that unavoidable thing, somehow louder and stronger than when the walls had been bare.