I recently left the only home I’ve ever had in Chicago, a six-flat built in 1905 that was once the home I believed I would live in as I stepped into the next steps of my life: marriage, next steps of career, and more.

Last year, after a series of personal tragedies, I sought out to rebuild something new in the old brownstone in Chicago. Through aggressive deal-making on Facebook Marketplace, dumpster diving, and repurposing hand-me-downs, I set out to piece together a home with a semblance of design I was actually proud to call home. The old furniture, refilling that near-empty apartment in the six-flat, was a reflection of proving to myself that I could rebuild a home beyond tragedy; and that life plans gone awry aren’t strong enough to take my home away from me. It was my first genuine attempt to apply architecture into my living space and take the concept of “designing one’s life” seriously.

Architect Mark Wigley once said:

Design derives its force not from stability, but rather from the expression of those moments when that sense of stability has slipped.

Design became a way of expressing and solidifying a desire to become stronger, to become resilient and capable of supporting myself as someone who historically has relied on other people’s opinions or validation for my own worth (I’m not proud of saying that so publicly, but it’s the truth). Design became a force of expression to delight in as I furnished a home into one can I could reimagine and make my own.

And then I sold it all.

As the last year has been a year of (at times) violent reimagining of myself, so it has it gone with my home. Since March, I’ve sold or given away virtually every piece of furniture I had, eschewing the turn-of-the-century traditional vintage furniture. I’ve watched almost every piece of furniture I’ve ever owned leave out the door in a moving truck (or in the case of a large hutch, get personally carried across the entirety of Hyde Park to a buyer’s home).

Mies van der Rohe said that that design is “the will of an epoch translated into space.” If that’s the case, then the sale of this old furniture was a simple reflection of the desire to finally leave the past behind and embrace what life can genuinely be today, hardly a simple exercise for a nostalgia-addicted person like myself.

Standing in a 60s condo, the original energy of mid-century modern design seems to fit naturally with my own rejection of what has come before, as novel self-confidence and peace feel as liberating as the chrome and leather of early modernist furniture felt pitted against the heavy woods and intricate designs foundational to furniture in the early industrial age. The will to embrace the beauty of life in the present, for what feels like the first time in my life, is translated into the clean lines, smooth shapes and antonymic designs finding their way into my new apartment. Instability and change drives design again, though this time in a far more triumphalistic direction than the year before.

But alas, as is probably “on theme” for a modernist home, this surge of design thinking quickly gave way to more practical matters. Le Corbusier calls a house a “machine for living in;” the realization was soon made that I have a lousy machine because of a glaring issue that has arisen as the moving boxes get emptied and discarded:

I don’t have anywhere to sit.

I bought everything else, but I still haven’t bought any chairs.

***

I’m in love with a style of cantilevered chair called the Cesca chair, designed originally by Bauhaus architect Michael Breuer in the 1920s as simple “S”-curved steel tubes with rattan (dried palm fiber) stretched between them. They’re one of the defining images of 20th century design, blending availability to the masses with arresting departure from past traditional design. To fill the chairless void in my apartment, I sought out a set of four of these chairs.

As is natural in the mostly digital world of buying furniture, I start at Wayfair. Armed with my twenty percent coupon as a newcomer to this world of shopping for “new” furniture, I scan the options for mid-century modern chairs. Wayfair has cheap and passable knockoff sets of these chairs for seventy to eighty dollars a chair.

Yet the questions come hard and fast, leaving me paralyzed from purchasing a chair set for days as they toiled in my cart, the “LAST ONE!” sticker placed over the product images mocking me profusely: “What if the quality of these chairs is terrible? What if they look tacky? Aren’t these just bad mimics of something real? Will they arrive broken like so many of these reviews?”

Thus, after a few days, I set out to find something with a better assurance of quality. This leads me to a chair importer from Italy, named after the chair’s architect itself. The site had every possible color and size of the Cesca chair known to man, for a price of $200 per chair. Yet I could not bring myself to buy the chairs, assaulted with more questions from my wandering mind: “Are these chairs actually higher quality? As in, $130/ea higher quality? How do I know these are going to last more than a few months? Wait, did tariffs just drive the cost up on these?”

A question far more deadly to this process comes up after looking at this site: “Are these even the chairs I want?”

A few days more pass. My parents ask about the chairs. I lie and say that I’ve bought chairs and they’ll take a while to ship. I don’t really know why I felt the compulsion to lie about that. The dust settles in my cart again.

Soon, my persistent internal questions drive me to sites which anonymous Reddit users promise will provide a slightly (emphasis on slight) higher level of quality, such as Article, Dania, and West Elm. The price of the chairs has slipped higher, reaching around $300 per chair. The websites and catalogs for these companies are sleek and modern, evoking the same traditional simplicity of the furniture style I’m trying to buy. Perfect for suckers like me, lost and trying to discern what I actually want in the world of subtly modern furniture.

More questions abound: “Isn’t this an insane amount of money to spend on a chair? Is this actually any higher quality? Is this just a sham wrapped up in a pretty website?

“But why stop there?” Like a devil sitting on my shoulder, an entirely new line of questions become woven into my brain: “Don’t you want real furniture you’ll delight in? If you’re going to spend this much for furniture that is still fake, why not just take the leap and get the real thing?

Absurdity comes quickly and I find myself scanning furniture auctions in Chicago for pieces. $2000 for a set of Mies van der Rohe-designed chairs produced by Knoll Furniture. $2600 for a set of Cesca chairs made for the Thonet which have spent most of their lives in a Polish summer cottage. $4000 for a set of authentic BRNO Bauhaus chairs.

These sets are over forty times more expensive than the initial chairs I looked at, a fact which somehow does not affect my aggressively cost-conscious brain. Yet ,a values assessment keeps me scrolling and considering options in this escalating exploration about what my chairs could be for the space I’m trying to build:

“Doesn’t buying as high quality as possible honor the materials and labor needed to create something? Isn’t buying pieces that can be passed down as heirlooms, taking care of them in the process, something that is worthwhile to do financially and spiritually? Can this function as a permanent sign of hospitality in my home?

The questions reach an ungodly level of spiritual theorizing and mental gymnastics: Wait, doesn’t God Himself value beauty and craftsmanship—after all, God filled Bezalel with the Holy Spirit to build the tabernacle in Exodus, after all, he clearly cares for creativity and craftsmanship which is honoring to God and neighbor, right?

Right?

***

Three weeks pass. There are still no chairs purchased. The myriad of online accounts made on furniture store websites, paired with partially filled carts, quietly sit on internet tabs with little hope of ever being viewed again. I’ve wasted many hours working to find a set of chairs to buy.

If this process sounds absurd, it’s because it is. Looking back on the last three weeks of chair shopping, I’ve come to realize that much of this process is being driven by an escalating need to be perfect and subsequently trying to respond to any question I can anticipate coming up in my mind which could derail a decision I’ve made. This need boils down to one last searing question which tumbled me into this nonsense in the first place:

What if I get this wrong?

All of the questions which served as unfaithful servants while shopping for these dining room chairs tend to be easily resolved once you act and actually buy the furniture. Wrong size? Send it back or sell it. Cheaper quality than you want? Send it back or sell it. Doesn’t fit with other furniture? Put the chair in a different room or…send it back or sell it. Don’t like it? Second verse, same as the first.

Calling the stakes minor would be an overstatement. But one can easily become all too lost in optimizing; in seeing the opportunity to get the decision “right” and not have to work around problems if something goes “wrong.” Working to avoid such extra work or dissatisfaction seems like such a phenomenally weak thing to do, but we can so easily get caught in it when the possibility of getting something right (dare I say, perfect?) is still seemingly available to us in the here and now. And then we’re paralyzed in anything where we’re holding onto that possibility.

The irony of this entire asinine process was that the point of selling all of the furniture was to buy this new furniture as a reflection of finally learning to live in the present for the first time in my life: actually embracing the way life is, with how little of it is actually in your control, and working through it in a way that centers more and more of your life around the people and things you actually love in front of you. Instead, the act of buying a few small chairs led to the mental paralysis of a lifetime.

Maybe all of this illustrates just how hard that living in the present and moving forward actually is.

As I write this, there still aren’t any chairs in the dining room; I wrote this sitting on my floor.