I worshiped the Pottery Barn Teen catalogs, made a ritual of gathering them from the mailbox and retreating to my years-old discount bed, where I could peruse their golden pages in relative peace. Perhaps the only thing more exciting to receive each month was my subscription to Girl’s Life magazine, which reassured me that I, too, could achieve the perfect life of a successful, smart, and self-assured adolescent, rather than straight-up trying to sell me replicas of the furniture that filled the bedrooms of my popular classmates.

What captivated me most: the shadowbox line—a pure white furniture set with display cases built into each piece. Sturdy, yet elegant, in their own way, with glass fronts and endless possibilities for what to put inside. Imagine! My headboard could be transformed into a display of my literary and artistic triumphs, a tribute to my bestest best friends and me, or a testament to how many boys were vying for my affections, all told through the perfect placement of the aesthetically pleasing ephemera I dreamed this better, shinier version of ninth-grade me would collect as evidence of her academic and social prowess.

But it wasn’t just the headboard; it wasn’t just that I would go to sleep cradled by the sweet song of upper-class interior design and not-too-confrontational individuality—I could have a wardrobe, too, that inspired me to craft the coolest looks for school, fashion spreads featuring brands the real me didn’t even know the names of as the PB Teen version of myself selected the perfect combination of layered Lacoste polos each morning. Pottery Barn-me would clasp my “please return to” Tiffany’s locket around my neck, grab my Coach purse, and never think about the fact that what I wanted wasn’t the stuff at all, but the sense of belonging it seemed to give other girls at my high school.

My desk would be inlaid with some essential element of me, a landscape I could shift and shape and add to as I continued to collect the evidence of my effortless awesomeness. The desk was where the creation happened—writing, homework, art projects—and this would become a project in itself, keeping everything up-to-date as my high school projects gave way to my life’s work. Here, I would pen the college application essays that would secure my early admission to Barnard, write the beginnings of my best-selling novel, and study lines for my Broadway debut. 

It wasn’t only—or even primarily—the fact that a complete set of Pottery Barn furniture was financially inaccessible that made me crave it. Of course, I wanted to feel like someone whose parents did not pick up free furniture off the streets on their rare Sundays off work but rather could invest in a complete template for their daughter to start from in launching what was sure to be her wondrous existence. 

Maybe more important was my belief that having the shadowbox line would show I was the kind of person who could work with constraints but still make a thing her own; it would mark me as someone who knew what she wanted but left a little bit of room for surprise. It would complete me, while opening up avenues of archival curation, of collaging, of color matching, of potential, that I would not have considered before. 

I knew it was out of my league, and out of my parents’ price range, but that didn’t stop me from wanting it—from lusting after that two-page spread and thinking that someday there would have to be a half-off sale, and hoping that if I ever made it onto the Trading Spaces home decor show, my neighbors would know that this was my non-negotiable instruction: Do whatever you want, I’d say, but leave me my shadowboxes. Let them be built into the places where I rest my body, prepare my body for the day, discipline my body to think and write and dream. Let me have air and space but also guardrails; let me compile the trinkets and letters and postcards that I love to preserve, and have a purpose for them besides sitting in the boxes under my bed until I feel the emotional pull to have a nostalgic feelings-purge and spread them all over my floor one Saturday night, where I’ll sit laughing and crying and wondering about myself and the world and all the things in it, the things that I want and the things that I need, and the things that I’ll never get, and the things I’ll have to create for myself.