What buying a sofa taught me about self-care
Over the last month, I’ve found myself going through a very particular rite of passage: buying a new sofa.
What made it difficult for me wasn’t the sheer volume of choice.
It wasn’t the number of sales (Christmas is always full of them) which I’ve always ignored.
Or even, the cost (wait, there’s this thing called interest free credit??)
It was realising that I was allowed to buy a new one in the first place.
Because there’s a dark side to gratitude.
One of the most researched and cheapest things you can do to be happier is to list the things you’re grateful for.
For me, this comes pretty naturally. I grew up in poverty, so I feel incredibly grateful for what I have now as an adult.
For example, as I sit here and write this sentence, the sunlight is streaming through my window after days of rain. I’m warm, I’m dry, I have food in my fridge. I know that not everyone has these basic things.
And so, just before Christmas, I felt grateful for my break from work. From sitting here, at this laptop, on an office chair in the corner of my living room. And I noticed that, instead of feeling rested, I was in even more pain.
Why? Because I was spending more time on my sofa during the day.
And my first thought, after realising that I always felt uncomfortable on my sofa? “How do I sew deeper covers for my seat cushions, so I can pad out the top layer?”
It didn’t occur to me that I could, well, buy another one.
Even though, I soon realised, my current sofa was probably made in the early 2000s (an old neighbour gave it to me 15 years ago).
When I got it, it was stained and tired from years of kids jumping on it in their playroom, having been relegated from their living room years before. The seats were firm and uncomfortable. The back cushions had long been destroyed and discarded.
But I took off the covers on what remained, washed and dyed them back to their original fresh spring green, and improvised new padding for the back.
It was also a sofa bed - how lucky was I? I could turn my living room into a spare bedroom for guests. It meant that my mum could come and stay for Christmas. Friends and visitors always had a place to crash.
And so I discussed my sewing ideas with Claude.ai, as part of my revised journalling experiment.
I’m slightly embarrassed to say that it was he - an entity with no corporeal form - who expressed concern about the amount of physical pain I was in, the amount of energy it would take for me to sew new covers, and who essentially said, “You know shops sell sofas, right??”
Because I was so grateful for the gift of this sofa that it didn’t occur to me that I could replace it.
(That’s not strictly true. My dear friend Adam once took me round IKEA in a wheelchair. I sat on a sofa bed, decided that it wasn’t more comfortable than my existing IKEA sofa bed, and freaked out the broadcaster Edith Bowman by spotting her and whispering not quietly enough to Adam, “Oh my god, that’s Edith Bowman!”)
When you don’t think you can change your circumstances, you adapt. You mitigate. You do things to offset how the adaptation drains you.
And it wasn’t until this god damn sofa buying business that I realised a) I’m in my home 24/7, way more than most people normally are, so probably use my sofa way more, and b) my adaptation had tipped over into over-adaptation.
I had become habituated to something not right for me. Many of us can be guilty of this, from kitchen drawers that stick and add friction multiple times a day, to relationships that leave us feeling tired and irritable.
It can take some of us a hot minute to realise when a strength (the ability to adapt) is overused and becomes a weakness.
And that maybe, just maybe, our own well-being is worth investing in.
(I know. THE NOVELTY.)
Which in my case meant a very tangible next action: buying a new sofa.
But when I was a child, furniture was always second-hand. We just had whatever someone else was throwing out (oh my god, like my current sofa from my old neighbour!)
So buying from new meant CHOICES and a learning curve. I spent weeks falling in love (Velvet! Emerald green! A recliner! A VELVET EMERALD GREEN RECLINER!) and comparing composition (pocket springs, s-springs, fibre, foam).
Time and again, I came up against a new internal barrier. “I can’t spend that much.” “Am I allowed to spend that much on something just for me?” “It will be too heavy for the delivery men.”
In the face of overwhelming choice, I eventually discerned what was important to me. “Do they have good customer service?” wiped out most of the vendors in my price range, and my price range wiped out most of the good-quality vendors.
And eventually, I did the most middle-class thing in the world. I went with John Lewis.
Of course I did.
Customer service. Serpentine springs. Easy-clean fabric. Fibre-wrapped foam seats and webbed backing (I did NOT come to play, people).
After a genuinely sleepless night about the increased cost of a matching footstool (so I can still get my recliner, kinda) in an “easy-clean eco velvet” in a “smoke grey” that had 30% off because, IDK, grey sofas are OUT this season or something, I finally placed the order last Friday.
(I didn’t want a smokey grey sofa, but it was the only sample that made me go “Ooh…” when I took it out of the envelope. Another lesson learned; trust my instincts, and that “Ooh”, more often.)
It’s not due for another 8 or 9 weeks, which actually works for me as a) I’ll need to air out my flat after the whole sofa switcheroo and the weather may be warmer and b) dear lord, the removal/delivery guys will have zero chance of doing their job unless I move at least three bookcases first.
It also gives me the chance to employ my word of the year in my general preparation, too: Curation.
That thing I realised, about being in the same 4 walls, like, ALL THE TIME?
It also helped me to realise that I want to be surrounded by beauty. I want to live my life like a collaborative work of art, to treat myself as a work of art more, too.
To be a colourful jewel on that new sofa.
To pare back my possessions and to welcome in new ones that feel intentional, creative, and that spark joy.
And to hopefully, finally, be able to sit in god damn comfort.
Photo by RF._.studio _: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-lying-on-orange-sofa-3621486/
