#111 : I'M TWO YEARS CLEAN AND SOBER!

And it feels like Nothing.

RAWWWWRGGHHH. Greetings from the home stretch of a period of my life known as My Last Move For At Least Five Years While I Build Some Fucking Equity. The mood of the last few months? Limitless dread. The soundtrack? Screeeech. That would be the schreech of Uline packing tape—clipped to measure with my favorite Grover-blue Hay scissors—sonically layered over Howard Stern and Robin Quivers cackling from the Sirius app playing on the iPhone stuffed into my sports bra. My most complex thoughts during this era? How can I create a pita pocket-like sleeves out of cardboard boxes to slip my artwork into? I’d pounce on the project with an Exacto knife. Then: screech. More. Tape. Tape. TAPE.

I was sequestered in my old apartment on Saint Marks Place, frozen in the mess until I got everything done. In the meantime, I had a contractor working on the condo, hitting me up with 7 AM “Pick a white paint NOW, Cat” deadlines. After a disastrous first go with pink-hued Benjamin Moore Atrium White (recommended by a broker, not my own), I went with Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace in an Eggshell Finish (it was boring, white-white, modern and perfect). Amidst all that, I was coordinating Home Depot deliveries, picking out fugly towel hooks in polished chrome, learning what the hell a vanity light is, and sending contractor work security deposits to my management company in fair Yonkers.

PSSSST. Oh, and I was also self-tanning. That was me blasting myself nostalgically with an aerosol can of long-since expired (and now discontinued) Lancome Flash Bronzer Self-Tanning Spray, just to use up a bunch of beauty products so I wouldn’t have to move them to the new apartment. It kinda still worked, look:

Greasy!

I gave myself a full month to move, because I thought I’d need it. Early on in the process, when I returned from Africa, I woke up in the morning feeling sick, staring at my wardrobe area, which was a small room across the hall from my bedroom of clothes, perfumes, bags, shoes—so much stuff. I braced myself for the month to come. My life was so tidy these days, and moving would be so messy. Would a month even be enough time? Friends like the enchanted night's Rachel Rabbit White and yoga's Beth Cooke offered moving help; I declined so I could squirm in my stress chamber alone. It would be chaos; pure chaos. Wobbly white Hay shelves would have to be dismantled. Muji Polypropylene Storage Drawers, of which I am one of the world's most foremost collectors, would emptied en masse. Every bobby pin, body splash, National Portrait Gallery postcard of Ed Sheeran by Colin Davidson, Tom Ford lipstick, Cookies Hoops baseball cap, and KAWS x Uniqlo Cookie Monster t-shirt would be yanked from its home.

I felt so overwhelmed. But I ordered my usual Uline apartment moving kit, plus a couple of wardrobe boxes, and got started. I wrapped my Pablo lamps and white Design Within Reach Tall Story bookshelf and vintage Saarinen tulip chair in clear contractor bags. I sold my Design Within Reach Havana sleeping sofa, my drill, my Coach x Keith Haring crossbody bag. I wrapped my weird Italian LED light in bubble tape. SCHREECH. There’s that tape again. I slipped my perfumes, bottle by bottle, into socks.

Weeks of work passed, and I was done—two weeks earlier than I thought I’d be.

“Huh,” I thought.

My movers showed up exactly fourteen days later. I always use the same three guys, whom I met in 2014, when I had a book deadline hanging over my head for HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE. They have moved me from TriBeCa to Chinatown, then out of Chinatown and into a storage unit so I could travel the world. Days later, before I departed, they moved me into a different, more secure storage facility because I was convinced the truck had been followed by someone who wanted to rob me. During Covid, back home in New York in 2020, they moved me into into the same building in Chinatown, then into Bushwick in 2021. Three months later, they moved me out of Bushwick (some day, I’ll tell that story—of the only lease I ever broke) and into Saint Marks Place, where I stayed for three years. In other words, they’ve seen me at so many phases of my life; they've seen me high and low, frazzled, paranoid, and desperate.

This time around? The head mover came into the apartment I was leaving to check out what would be done. He found me up on the counter like a monkey, scouring the top of the fridge for the last remaining item: a single pen.

“You’re so organized this time,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “This is my first sober move.”