adjustment

It came to me recently, in a very obvious, always-known kind of way, that my life constantly requires adjustment--mostly in the most trivial corners--partly due to general circumstances and partly due to individual personality. My bedroom, which is meant to be part of our living room, doesn't have a closet. I perused Craigslist fervently for a week to find a closet, to no avail, until I found a suitable IKEA one in the lobby of our building, being thrown out and given to me for free. This is important because this revelation arrived as I was poking a hole in the side of said closet, so that I could attach a string from its metal rod inside to a hanging shoe rack outside (this rack wouldn't fit inside my closet). J. was impressed by this improvisation, much more so than by the sheet I haphazardly tied to my blinds as a pseudo-curtain, or my water-damaged phone that I often have to coax into working with a peculiar mix of turnings on and off. Granted, much of me requires adjustment because I'm clumsy and break things, because I don't throw things away when they're no longer working to maximum capacity. But a lot of things are out of my control. For example, because my body is non-ideal in several ways, a lot of my clothing requires adjustment to fit right. I've been only mildly successfully creative with tucking in, sewing up, fashioning makeshift straps, with hand-me-downs and my mom's clothes and my own since I was little. I think safety pins are as amazing as Scotch tape.

Adjustment is a blanket term. Some things just happen. For whatever reason my Polaroid takes pictures slightly off-center, so after I've framed something in the viewfinder as I want it, I have to shift it ever so slightly to the left, to have it turn out on film the way I see it (never exactly, of course). Then there's my surroundings. Growing up with siblings who had it ingrained in them to find all the roundabout ways to get the best deals, from loading a dozen people into one hotel room, buying CDs from BMG (12 for the price of 1; with shipping and handling, this comes to $5 a CD, a third of the average price), and watching four movies in one day (illicitly, for the price of one). Communication in my family is tricky as with anyone's, obstacles in the form of language, culture, age, gender. Known as the stubborn, fast tempered one in the family, I wouldn't say I've adjusted well to all those obstacles, but I think they've helped me adapt over the years, and at the very least, I'm used to things not being straightforward. It's true that logistics and emotions then get messy, but over the past couple years of struggling with how frustratingly mixed up I can be, I've grown to appreciate both the downsides and the pure value of requiring adjustment.

Ali wondered recently how people come to be well-adjusted. The above are the trivial; everyone has their smattering of more serious things to adjust to in their lives. I don't think I can say I've had much hard to adjust to, or at least, I don't see it as such because they were my adjustments, and I don't think people can always see their own very clearly. One of the best parts of seeing patients is being reminded anew every half hour, of how people adapt to the inconvenient, difficult, painful things that happen to them. It's true that some handle it with more grace than others, and that sometimes people are irreparably changed in a way that is less adjustment and more damage. In light of that, I welcome all chances to adjust, if only to feel how very very far fragility stretches before it becomes fragile.