Things that ought to have closed remain open, much like my beloved daughter’s flight, which we had to postpone today on account of illness. A few precious days remain in the warmth of home. That cosy silence has returned to her old childhood room, and I have returned to my writing desk, where the textbooks of interior design are looking back at me. I am returning to my studies for the third time. To admit this aloud calls for a certain measure of self-irony — the kind that develops in a person only after forty. It is the sort of perseverance that balances on the edge between admirable stubbornness and a quiet despair at running from one’s own goals. Or perhaps it is simply pure madness.
For a long time I have asked myself — chiefly myself, of course — whether my multipassionate nature is a gift, or merely a curse tastefully wrapped. In this world of ours, which fetishises hyper-specialisation, a person of broad scope appears as someone who does not know where they belong. Quite so. That abundance of my own creativity, and that extraordinary enthusiasm for new and intriguing themes, lasting only a certain time before I moved on to the next — is precisely what confines me within that box. But do you know what distinguishes it from a traditional box? I have never truly abandoned any of those themes. Or rather — they have not abandoned me. They have inscribed themselves as further experience, further skill, perhaps even a trait of character. They have stayed.
For years I hovered between the need to write, the necessity of building a brand, and the longing to be in the silence of the stable. And in the midst of it all, of course, going to work. I felt that, were I to set off in one direction, I should inevitably betray the others. That were I to immerse myself in the textures of linen and old wood, I should lose touch with the logic of a technical drawing. By the way — I get lost in those anyhow. But not for want of knowledge. The truth is, I was not running from design. I was running from my own perfectionism, which whispered that until something is perfect, I am not enough.
This inner critic of mine — the one I keep hoping I shall one day outgrow — has a long memory. It remembers my beautiful bookshop, which I once kept in my parents’ house, on the square of my small home town. It was then that I began to write, but my perfectionism would not allow me to claim the mantle of an author. When my parents decided to sell the house and move to the countryside, I took it as the perfect excuse. The doors closed, and I stopped writing — for I had a reason of outward circumstance to justify me before my own ambition. After all, I had lost my beautiful oak desk, which had stood at the centre of my little book sanctuary, with that famously notable green lamp and all those perfectly arranged trifles that made it a candidate for Pin of the Year. Admit it. Without that desk, I simply could not write.
Later, history repeated itself in different settings. After several years in the corporate world, and my chase after the title of top manager, I attempted to return to interiors. I opened a shop with designer accessories — at last I wished to begin practising my profession, but the school remained unfinished. The feeling that without the paper, I had no right to create spaces with a soul, paralysed me. And then the pandemic came. To many a tragedy — to my fear of imperfection, however, a magnificent and legitimate excuse not to see a project through to its end. Subconsciously I drew a sigh of relief — I could close the shop and walk away, because the world had stopped, not because I was afraid of failure. I ran from the school as well. The first time, because SketchUp did not engage me. I told myself that if ergonomics and technical parameters did not fascinate me, I should never make a good designer. It took me years to understand that design is only the framework. And what I am seeking lies, in fact, far more deeply beneath the surface.
It is my struggle with the unfinished.
For the first time in my life, I do not need an excuse to stop. After twenty-three years devoted to my daughter — my closest friend, whose own university path has now released me to return to myself — I feel that I need to trace the lines of my floor plan in permanent ink. Definitively.
Perhaps my being multipassionate does not mean being scattered. Perhaps it merely means that my floor plan has several levels. And so I have returned to school for the third time, in order to understand the grammar of the interior — but in truth, I am seeking the stability of my own identity. It seems that this unfinished floor plan of mine is, in fact, my greatest expertise. I know what it is to tear down, to run, and to build again. I know that home is the place where we have at last decided to stay — in spite of our imperfections.
In a month, I have my final defence. It is time to finish the floor plan.
I wish you a beautiful evening,
Nicolette xx
