Small ways I’m adjusting to Apartment Living
This year I’m living in an apartment for the first time, and I’m learning to be intentional about how I take up space. There’s a lot of things I realize I took for granted living at home, like certain necessities that were just always there that I never had to buy, endless room for all my clothes and infinite opportunities to swap clothes with my sister across the hall. Now that I’m responsible for my own little space, it’s my job to make sure I have everything I need but also not too much.
One of my priorities for my apartment has been to be realistic about the amount of clothes I have circulating through my closet. At some point in my life I adopted the strange notion that people can’t see me in the same piece of clothes twice within a two week period. I think I started doing that in middle school, when I went to a school that was so small that everyone could and would, intentionally or not, remember what everyone wore. I also have an issue with getting rid of clothes that I like but never wear. The reality is there’s some clothes that just aren’t comfortable, are too formal or too casual to wear on a daily basis or just don’t fit right.
In recent months I’ve cut my functional wardrobe down to exactly what I like to wear on a daily basis. I’ve also shifted to a mindset of experiencing clothes, not collecting them. This was inspired by a Pinterest board I stumbled upon that was encouraging being an active member of the thrifting community, meaning both buying and donating your clothes. I’ve been a big fan of buying used clothes for a while now, but have a harder time parting with curated clothes from my closet. For this reason, I’ve kept a 1 in 1 out policy for the past couple of months. This means every time I want to buy a new item for my closet, I have to donate or sell something I already have. It’s helped me to buy things I actually really want, to save money and to keep my closet smaller.
Another big thing has been managing the food I keep on hand. It’s been so strange to balance having enough food to last until the next time I’m able to go grocery shopping while also not buying too much that I can’t eat it before it expires. We’ve always bought food in bulk at home because we’re a busy family that is able to go through a lot of it, but it’s been really difficult trying to figure out what’s a realistic amount of food for me. There are some nonperishables I keep all the time, like pasta, rice, sugar, flour, etc., so I always have something I can prepare, but I’ve been trying to maintain a balanced diet as well. The other issue is that when I eat pasta every day for like two weeks, food starts to become so uninteresting, and then I lose motivation to cook or eat anything at all.
Last week I meal-prepped for the first time and I loved it! I found a recipe on Pinterest for a vegetarian wild-rice soup that incorporated eight different vegetables and was so easy to prepare. The recipe was meant for a family, so I made the whole thing and kept it in a big container in my fridge and reheated it throughout the week for dinner. Most rich soups taste better when they’ve been in the fridge for a little while anyways, because the flavors all incorporate really well. I also baked a pan of muffins to have for breakfast on my walk to class. It was a huge success. I was able to eat delicious food all week without having to worry every night about what I was going to make or how to use up my groceries. I highly recommend it.
There’s been many more adjustments I’ve had to make to get used to living away from my parents. I lived in the dorms last year, which had its own unique sense of independence. But with the dining halls and so many people around me, it felt like a more artificial environment, like a practice round for living in a real apartment. Although we’ve run into several challenges along the way we didn’t expect, my roommate and I are loving apartment life so far and it’s been really fun to create a home away from home here.