Where to Begin?

Sitting in my parents’ home over the holidays, I was faced with some bigger questions than I ever expected to face around my 28th birthday. I had always considered myself successful; though I didn’t have my own house and wasn’t in a romantic relationship, I had two beautiful and loving dogs, was crushing all my company’s goals at the office, and was living on my own. By all appearances, things were going really well. Except, they weren’t.

On December 15th, just 10 days before Christmas, I took the dogs out for a walk and was approached by an employee of my apartment complex. Now, my dogs didn’t seem to like him so I couldn’t have a conversation without them pulling my arm out, so the man left me some paperwork by my door and went on his way. Curious, I picked up the paperwork after he’d gone. My heart nearly stopped and all thoughts of my dogs needing to go to the bathroom fled my mind. I hurried them around a short loop of the apartment complex and ushered them inside in the space of maybe five minutes.

The paperwork the employee had so innocently left by my door was a Notice to Quit. For those of you who don’t know, as I didn’t, it’s a precursor to getting evicted. It essentially means, you’ve defaulted on your rent and you have to pay everything within a short timeframe (in my case 10 days) before you will be taken to court for removal. Thankfully, Massachusetts had developed some very pro-tenant laws and they’d only gotten more lenient with the pandemic, so I wasn’t necessarily getting evicted in two weeks as the letter said. But, it was a brutal shock to my system. I had never defaulted on anything before, but as I looked at my life in those first minutes of receiving the letter, I had to face the truth that I had never had ‘control’ of my finances and had never been ‘taking care of myself’ in a productive or long-lasting way.

I immediately called some of my closest friends, the Massachusetts aid program, and my bank to see if I could get the defaulted money and get out of the eviction process. I was thankfully able to get the funds and will be able to stay in my apartment. But, as I paid off that late rent I realized that I didn’t want to just go back to the way that everything was when I got into this mess. I needed to do something dramatically different.

So, while I stayed with my parents over the holidays, a classic avoidance tactic that I had practiced many times before, I spent a lot of time pondering how to get my life on a better track. That was when I realized, I already knew the answer; and even more, I knew that my approach to the problem had been wrong. My mind had been trying to think of ways to ‘downgrade’ my lifestyle or adjust for lower spending when I wasn’t getting at the heart of my issues - I was remarkably unhappy and had been filling my time with high-cost items and useless stuff.

Because I had been so unhappy, one of the things I had been doing was fantasizing about moving into a bus conversion, or a skoolie as that community fondly calls them. It had been purely a fantasy because I never thought I could actually do it, never thought I could build something like that, or get my life to fit in such a small (270 sq. ft.) space.

With the Notice to Quit in my hands, this stopped being a fantasy and turned into a lifestyle change that I genuinely wanted to pursue. But, first, some other things needed to change in how I was living in my apartment. Looking forward to a dramatic change, like moving into a skoolie, wasn’t going to be enough to actually make a difference in how I was living my life - I knew I would still be miserable, just in a smaller and mobile space.

So, over the last week, I’ve gone whole-heartedly into learning more about the idea of minimalism. I had previously done work with Kondo’s methods of finding things that spark joy, particularly in my clothing, since that's always taken up a huge portion of my space. But my work there had never gone the step further into true minimalism. I read multiple books, consumed an unhealthy amount of podcast episodes, and drowned myself in as much as I could find about different approaches to this lifestyle.

While it terrifies me to move from my over-consumption lifestyle to a minimalistic one, I have this hesitant excitement at the same time. Possibly the most impactful thing I’ve learned, and am trying to embrace right away, is moving from someday to today. What do I want my life to look like, what do I enjoy doing and want more of in my life, or less of and find draining? When an idea pops into my head, instead of imagining that as a far away, dream scenario, can I make small changes right away that take me in that direction? It doesn’t have to be perfect - I don’t need to get to the gym and have the best workout of my life to start my fitness journey, I can do ten minutes struggling on my floor, and boom! I’ve started and can grow that into something more later, but it’s all about doing little bits and making the present the most important time of my life.

All that to say, I have decided to take this incredible journey with my two Bernese Mountain dogs, Fitz and Archie. I’m sure it won’t go perfectly to the plan that my brain has dreamed up, but I know that in the end, I will have such a better understanding of what really matters to me beyond vague platitudes, and will be able to fill my life with those things.