Issue #87: IKEA, and the myth of compartmentalisation

Not everything fits into neat little boxes.

About once a year, when I’m feeling stressed, I take myself off to IKEA. The majority of people I tell this to deem it a strange antidote, suggesting that the experience of visiting IKEA is, in itself, quite stressful.

But perhaps the majority of people don’t know the joy of wandering around IKEA alone, embodying Main Character Energy (as the kids would say), with nowhere else to be, playing back-to-back podcasts while I lose myself in a long-held fantasy of mine. A fantasy where everything in my life is neatly packed into boxes.

Because they’ve got them all, folks. Big ones, small ones, ones that fold into an inoffensive little rectangle of velvety polyester and others, more substantial in shape, that are woven and decorative. There are stackable (stackable!) plastic ones in 50 shades of neutral – with thoughtful details like little handle-holds, or a dip in the middle for your rolled-up cleaning cloths.

And let’s not forget the Tupperware. Tupperware of all sizes, of all purposes – from teeny tiny plastic rectangles to hold, say, a sliver of smoked salmon, to large square ones made from glass, a non-carcinogenic container to hold leftovers from the family-sized tofu curry you made over the weekend.

It’s not just the purchasing of said containers – and you best believe I bought a fair few – that gives me so much joy. It’s what happens afterwards, when I bring them home. Cue, a declutter! An exorcism of the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ drawer, a new zippable home for my bedding slid neatly under the bed, a portioning of everything hanging out loose in my fridge into neat, microwave-safe glassware.

There is, I admit, more to it than just the boxes. As I mentioned early, this annual trip tends to coincide with periods of stress; more specifically, periods where I feel out of control. When this happens, I struggle to mentally compartmentalise. My insecurity around, say, something I’m writing spills over into my love life (or vice versa?). Anxiety about the future turns into immediate money worries. A misunderstanding with a friend has a domino effect. I read a news story that haunts me for days. Professional stress manifests itself in domestic discord, so that my flat begins to resemble something dangerously akin to my teenage bedroom. The inside of my head, come to think of it, starts to resemble that mess – floordrobe included. And then I’m walking into Pret, and the decision of what sandwich to buy takes up to ten minutes – and, reader, it is usually not about the sandwich either.

When I feel this mental mess, it’s IKEA, and the subsequent process of ordering, clearing, compartmentalising, that makes me feel calmer, soothing me with a visible illusion (delusion, perhaps) that everything might soon have its place once again.

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Some people excel at compartmentalising. One of the podcast episodes I listened to on the way around IKEA was an interview with Lindsay Nicholson, former editor of Good Housekeeping. Following a series of intense personal turmoil (the loss of her first husband and, subsequently, daughter from the same rare form of leukaemia), Nicholson continued to work, turning up visibly pregnant (with another, younger daughter) just after she’d lost her husband, and then taking just three weeks of maternity leave before returning to work.

‘My grief was so bad I needed that escape… There was nothing I wanted more than a challenge that would absorb every waking minute.

Bottling our feelings up is wrong, so we’re told – hopefully by our parents and therapists but, failing that, certainly by our most lauded Americans.

And yet it’s hard not to listen without a tinge of admiration for what Nicholson did over those stoic, resilient years, throwing herself into work and turning Good Housekeeping’s dwindling readership figures into the green. Nicholson is ambivalent about the relentless work ethic – and, no doubt, fierce compartmentalising – that carried her through. On the one hand, she describes the workplace as her ‘safe space’ and a ‘refuge’. For 8-10 hours a day, I could be a normal person, she tells host

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. However, she details movingly how this compartmentalisation did come to affect her later down the line, in the form of a nervous breakdown. Clearly, there are limits.

The outside expectation to ‘compartmentalise’ isn’t always a bad thing. It may only be an illusion of neatness, but it’s one that makes us feel safe, in the same way that my IKEA boxes do. Whether it’s performing your role in the office, or indeed returning home from the office to a family home, sometimes compartmentalising – just for a while – can remind you that there is another version of you, a version that the stress or sadness doesn’t obliterate entirely. I remember interviewing Paloma Faith the morning after a crushing, life-transforming break-up and, honestly? It was the best, albeit the bizarrest, place for me in that moment.

The challenge, I think, is to work out where it’s safe to dissolve those boundaries. My newly-ordered flat will creep back towards its former messiness. And so will a carefully-ordered mind, groaning under the weight of everything that needs to be be taken out and examined.

I have accepted this blurring in some respects. My writing, I have realised, will never be entirely separate from my personal life – given that so much of the latter inspires the former – and perhaps I need to accept that, in my closest relationships, I have to at least talk about it. Another thing: I can’t pretend, as I did as a student, that I’m much too cerebral to be affected by the physical mess around me. I now know that a chaotic external environment compounds my internal chaos (and IKEA reaps the benefits).

There are areas where I’d like, in another kind of fantasy world, to be better at boxing things up, but in reality I’m still working on it. For instance, I often replay conversations I’ve had at a party or at work, an ongoing spiral that follows me home – and occasionally deflates me for a day or two. Sometimes they even follow me into a yoga class, or to my pillow. I wish I had the superhuman ability to separate myself from these things – but, right now, it’s a work-in-progress.

Still. There’s always IKEA.

Listening…

I have just one recommendation for you guys this week, and it is this episode of Song Exploder – one of my favourite shows, where music artists deconstruct how their songs were made. It’s so exciting hearing a real-life account from the studio of how creativity comes together: the personal life situations that inspire it, the musical influences. Talking of a failure to compartmentalise, I now can’t get this song out of my head. Enjoy!