"It was like being Carrie Bradshaw in 'Sex and the City' if Carrie had been a hoarder."

Amy and I co-hosted Miss Spoken on Sunday, February 16, 2025 at Cole’s. Pictues from that show can be viewed here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18079332148627037/.

Those of you who are familiar with the show might notice that this is a new night! A new venue! A new year! All of these things are true. I’ll get into the details in a future post (which is hopefully coming soon —- because I have so many updates for you).

For now here is the essay I delivered (as written, not as performed) for our show. The topic of the show was “Moving’.

To be clear, I wasn’t being evicted.

I wasn’t being evicted. That much was clear from the notice that the leasing company that appeared in my mailbox one December day in 2016.

But I wasn’t going to be able to renew the lease on my studio apartment in the shabby building I’d been living in since April 2007. This was a shame, as the studio in the shabby building was cheap, and close to the bus. It was a third of a city block away from the Thai restaurant where I got my weekly order of pad see ew, and around the corner from the neighborhood diner that used to be open 24 hours a day in the early 2000s.

It was a decent place for somebody like me who was making money but had bad credit and therefore couldn’t afford a place with in-unit laundry or a dishwasher or an actual separate bedroom. But if it was so decent, why couldn’t I keep it decent? Why was it that, by the time I got this notice, that the floor of this studio was covered with mountains of clothes and shoes. The sink was always full of dishes that needed to be washed, and on the counter next to the sink was a sleeve of paper plates I had taken to using instead. The shower had a permanent drip that had splashed the bathroom vanity so that it grew mold and dissolved into a rectangle of wood pulp and laminate that somehow still kept the sink basin aloft.

Somewhere under the piles of clothes was a second hand queen size mattress. The window sills were covered with books I never finished reading, and ashtrays left over from my 15 plus years as a regular smoker. I used the ashtrays to store odd earrings that had lost their mates, safety pins, and small change. The walls were a renter-friendly off-white, and never looked clean even when I half heartedly wiped at them with anti-bacterial wipes once or twice a quarter.

Clearly it was perfect.

Maybe not for you. Not for responsible adults who have solid careers and families and mortgages. But for me, at the time a 40 year old spinster with a boring job and credit card debt and honorary nieces and nephews who I sometimes remembered to send birthday presents to, it was great. It was like being Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City” if Carrie had been a hoarder. Like I was.

Like I am.

On “Sex and the City”, Carrie comes home one episode to find that her building is becoming a co-op. On her own, she doesn’t have the financial resources to buy her perfect apartment with its storage for her vast collection of shoes and proximity to Madison Avenue where she can always find a cab. What she does have is a good friend who, recently divorced with plenty of alimony and a perfect Park Avenue co-op apartment, sells her own engagement ring so that she can loan Carrie the money to use as a down payment.1

Who has friends like that in real life? And if somebody here does, please tell me who they are so we can be friends, too.

But Carrie wasn’t a hoarder, that we could see. She didn’t come home at the end of every day and unlock her door, then shove her shoulder into it so she could wiggle past the mountain of Old Navy leggings that prevented the door from opening fully. But I did, and I had been, ever since the summer of 2011.2

What happened in the summer of 2011? Funny that you ask — well, it isn’t because I literally just brought it up — but just know that this is something that I have just begun to discuss with my therapist so I hope to have an update soon-ish.

So I get this notice in December. My lease is up at the end of April. Which is four whole months to find a new apartment. Four whole months to save up the money for a security deposit and pay for a move, find a new apartment, pack up the shit in my old apartment, and get the old apartment cleaned. Somehow without letting all my responsible adult friends know what was going on. Or dodging the question when people asked why I was finally moving after living in my apartment for almost ten years.

Instead, I panicked.

And while I panicked, agents from the leasing company would be showing my apartment. Which they did, but then I’d get these voicemails, which were neutral at first and then increasingly negative, about how the showing agent couldn’t get into the apartment because of the aforesaid pile of Old Navy disposable clothing blocking the way to get in. I ignored these messages.

I panicked, and I went to my job. I planned and took two vacations.3 I did cancel one vacation, which was supposed to happen the weekend that I ended up moving.

Because, in the end, I did move. I came clean to four close friends (one of whom is here at the show — hey, Leah4), who descended upon my apartment the last Saturday of April 2017 to remove the clothes and the garbage and the purses that I didn’t just no longer need but didn’t even remember buying. We filled contractor bags with old magazines and holey socks and so many plastic coca-cola bottles because do I look like I drink water? To steal a line from Donna on “Parks and Recreation”. It rained all day, all weekend, in fact, and at some point, some guys from a service called, I shit you not, College Hunks Hauling Junk. Leah had found them and they took the heavy things and the not so garbage-y things I ended up getting rid of that I probably should have kept like my diploma from my fancy university but there’s no time to mourn that now when there’s a tube tv set from 1997 that needs to get up and gooooooooooooo.

The air was not clean, so some of us wore the masks that another friend, Jessi5, brought. I kept offering to buy food, and I was confused as to why none of my friends wanted to eat pizza in an apartment where the air was filled with dust particles and shed skin and a decade of my personal detritus. It wasn’t so bad as long as you opened a window. It wasn’t so bad if you stepped out into the haillway to confront the nosy neighbors who would peek in while they stood waiting for the elevator.

It was dark when Leah, the last of my four friends, went home. To shower and rest and hopefully forget all about what she had witnessed at Jasmine’s House of Hoarding. Everything except for a suitcase and a lamp and a pillow and a blanket.. I showered in my empty bathroom, where I still had a shower curtain liner and a towel. I’d throw them out in the morning. I curled up in the blanket but left the windows open. It was raining when I fell asleep and raining when I woke up the next morning.

Two skinny hipster artist types from Starving Artists Movers turned up to load what few things I had left into their large truck. I gave them water and gatorade and apologized profusely for the state of the apartment, which wasn’t as empty as I’d wanted nor was it as clean. But they didn’t mind, they said. They’d seen worse. Which sort of made me feel better. And it still does. I like to think they were telling me the truth.

Instead of moving into my new apartment, which was another studio but it was a bigger one and a brighter one with hardwood floors and a view of the water tower in Andersonville, I had to take my stuff to storage. The new place wasn’t going to be ready for another day, but I had to be out of the old one, so after dropping off my stuff at a storage utility in Avondale, I took an uber to a hotel in the Gold Coast. I had booked it using an app. It was cheap because it was Sunday night.

After I checked in early, and took a 45 minute long shower, I wrapped myself in a robe and lay in bed. Or on the bed, unwilling and afraid to unmake the bed. I watched some cable and, when it was time, I got dressed again so I could walk to the Walgreen’s on the corner to buy myself a bottle of coke, a magazine, and a little something to eat.