9 Months Into the Pandemic, My Bedroom Has Become My Everything

When I look around my bedroom, I’m overwhelmed by the amount of…well, things I’ve accumulated over the past few months. The shiny white hook from which I hang my colorful new assortment of masks; the altar-adjacent amount of scented candles on my windowsill; the neon-pink “Girls, Girls, Girls” sign I bought to recreate the aesthetic of my favorite, recently closed lesbian bar; the shelf where I proudly display the dollhouse-sized food miniatures I’ve begun trawling eBay for nightly.

All of this might sound like run-of-the-mill consumerism, but I can promise you: I wasn’t like this before. Prior to March, when COVID-19 first arrived in the U.S. and confined many of us to our homes, I spent most of my time at work or at bars or friends’ houses, returning to the fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn that I share with three roommates mostly to sleep, binge-watch TV, or heat up frozen ravioli from the haphazardly stocked grocery downstairs. I didn’t lavish attention on my bedroom decor, because what was the point? I wasn’t there much anyway.

Now we’re nine months into the pandemic, with cases rising in New York and around the country, and I’m relating to my bedroom—a 12-square-foot, white-walled cube with okay-ish light and a less-than-ideal amount of closet space—in an entirely new way. I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home, which means I now write stories and conduct interviews almost entirely from bed (or, on extremely productive days, from the tiny desk bolted to one wall).

Leisure-wise, I’m socializing in the outside world a bit more than I was this spring—for now, anyway—but I still spend an inordinate amount of my time in my chambre, watching trite romantic comedies on Netflix, rereading novels I’d skimmed the first time around, and making occasional, fleeting attempts to organize the stacks of unopened New Yorker magazines that have been making me feel insufficiently literary since I moved in three years ago.

If you’d told me in 2019 that my response to a global pandemic would primarily be “buying things,” I would have laughed you off. There’s something that feels decidedly un-revolutionary about the anxiety-induced nesting I’m doing. How embarrassing, how capitalist and distinctly female, to line the walls of your own little hidey-hole as the world literally burns, my brain whispers as I try to fall asleep at night.

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