Buy the Damn Sheets

^{Yesterday I had such a hard time getting out of my bed. I didn’t want to get up in the morning. Every time I came home from running an errand I wanted to jump right back in. I’m still thinking about it right now, in fact — and it’s all because of my sheets! I finally, at the not-so-small age of 38, bought myself some very luxurious and well-made bamboo bed sheets and I’m really obsessed with them. They are cooling and cozy at the same time, and a beautiful sage green that reminds me of a spa. And while I could probably sell them to anyone because they’re that lovely, this is not an ad.}

^{While the sheets really are my new favorite bedroom addition, I was sitting at my daughter’s flag football practice wondering why I’m SO tickled over having them. And I thought, well because Jakki, these are the kinds of sheets you’ve wanted for so many years but never could have them. And there it was.}

^{There certainly was a time where I couldn’t have even imagined spending $300 on sheets for my bed. It felt like that was something for people who had…more. Who were put together, who didn’t live paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, who had huge savings accounts. The people who also had matching towel sets and curated living rooms.Those were the people who had nice sheets. They deserved it, I thought.}

^{It’s actually been quite a while now that I could have swung buying these sheets. Years, in fact. So the “never could have them” wasn’t really true for all the years I spent sleeping on t-shirt material sheets from Target (no hate, they serve their purpose!). But I didn’t buy them until now, no matter how many iterations of them I’ve had saved in my Amazon cart. Because I didn’t deserve them.}

^{That wasn’t a conscious thought I had, more like a feeling deep in my being. We all tell stories about ourselves, and I don’t mean the childhood memories you share after a few glasses of wine. I’m talking about the stories we tell inside our own heads that end up narrating our lives. The ones where we define our character, and give it names and adjectives. And unbeknownst to us, those stories that we write and silently tell our brains begin to affect how we show up in life and how we feel about ourselves.}

^{Others will try to shape these stories too, sometimes on purpose and sometimes unbeknownst to them, simply by the way they treat you. What they say to you. How they love you, or don’t love you. Through tenderness, through harshness.}

^{I’ve spent my adult years trying to navigate through these stories about myself that live inside — editing the parts that need tweaking, drawing red lines through the parts others added that I never approved for publishing but slipped through the cracks. But somehow this adjective, undeserving, remained as one of the many character descriptors in the story I have about myself.}

^{The financial obstacles of earlier years have mostly subsided. But I don’t think holding off on buying the sheets was ever fully about the money, and much more to do with the way I saw myself, and sometimes still do. But they’re just sheets, right? How silly. It’s much more layered than that, though, and I recognize it and call it out to myself when I see it and pledge to work on it. Things like not getting haircuts for years at a time, or taking months and months to hang gifted artwork on my walls. It seems that anything I could do that is literally just for me and my own pleasure is very difficult for me to justify.}

^{But I’m working on it! And I’ve made honoring myself and the things that I need and/or want, even if “unnecessary,” a priority this year. And each time I do it, a little portion of the story is rewritten, intentionally and only by me.}

^{Buy the damn sheets. You deserve it.}