Imagine that tomorrow, a lawyer shows up at your house and tells you that finding you has concluded a 30-year search for a missing heir. You are the sole inheritor of a massive fortune that is large enough to transform not only your life, but the lives of every one of your friends and family. You can send your niece to an exclusive college. You can buy a house for your mom. You can travel the world with your best friend, Maurice, who has never not been there for you, willing to eat Ben & Jerry’s and watch “Dirty Dancing” with you after every traumatic breakup.
Imagine that this is legit, and not a “Nigerian Prince” sort of a scheme.
Now imagine that the lawyer tells you that this massive financial trust comes with a single stipulation: in order to ensure that the fortune is only given to someone with a) a decent personality, and b) a fair amount of self control, if you are to inherit this money you must live austerely for one year first. You cannot debt spend. You cannot purchase any luxury items. You cannot travel. You cannot eat out. You cannot borrow or accept money from anyone else. One year – no frills.
Would you do it?
I’m writing for everyone who would. Because this is the choice you are essentially given every day: today, tomorrow, next year. You have outrageous capabilities, unbelievable untapped strength, incredible heart that’s worth more than a limitless fiscal payout. But it’s going to take something serious and painful from you before you can live into it.
It’s possible that you’re a little like me, and right now you’re thinking, “Whatever, bitch” and rolling your eyes a little at my rhetoric.
But I know I’m right. Because there was nobody it seemed less true for than me, and if it was true for me, I swear it’s true for you.
When this story began for me, when I was 36 and living in my friend’s basement and trying to find somewhere I could afford to live while keeping my kids in the same school district (and finally running those first painfully slow miserable steps), there was no part of me that felt powerful.
This hadn’t always been true. I’d put myself through college on a debate scholarship, paying all my bills with a patchwork of jobs, and without parental assistance. I remembered feeling confident in my capabilities then, at least in select areas. I wasn’t sure where my courage or my sense of self had gone. I didn’t know if it had spontaneously combusted after the 37th time I didn’t stand up to my bully of a father-in-law, or whether it had died slowly from underuse as my life revolved around juice boxes and clipping coupons and trying to keep everyone else happy. At any rate, I felt weak and depleted and at odds with myself and the world. Nothing had turned out the way I had hoped it would, and I wasn’t sure who was in charge of my life, but I felt pretty confident it wasn’t me.
I think everyone loves a good epiphany story: the “this was my moment of realization when all the pieces of the universe shuffled themselves into place for me and it changed everything.” In movies, they usually happen with songs and montages; in books, they’re about three paragraphs at the beginning of a chapter 2/3 of the way through the book. I would love to have an epiphany experience, where I saw, like a movie played out instantaneously, all of the things I needed to change for everything to be awesome.
But I’ve never had one of these, and I’ve started to think they’re entirely fictional. All I did at first was start running, very badly. I was terrible at it, and it hurt and it sucked. But I kept doing it, even though it kept hurting and sucking. And then I finished that first 5k, and I began to have this germ of a thought, which kept cropping up, though it didn’t stick around for long at first:
Maybe I can do things that are really hard.
Maybe I’m brave like that.
I came back from Florida after my first 5k, and I kept running, though I wasn’t 100% sure why. I just knew that after I ran, I felt a little stronger, and a little more in control of my life and my thoughts. The following January, I ran my second 5k. It was just as hard as the first 5k, but I ran it a little faster, finishing in around 39 minutes. I was ridiculously proud of that 4 minute improvement. I had the thought,
Maybe, if I practice being strong, I’ll get better at it.
My personal life was still a dumpster fire. My divorce was in process, my soon-to-be-ex-husband and I were having difficulty coming to any kind of agreement, and I desperately needed a place to live. Finally, a very kind realtor I was working with came to me with some news. “I found a place,” he said, “that is in your price range and the girls’ school district. But. When you look at it, you are going to have to think of it as it could be, not as it is.”
What is was, was a crack house.
This is not an exaggeration or a descriptive flourish.
The townhouse he showed me was a foreclosure that had been abandoned after more than one police raid for drug use. The previous owners had apparently stopped paying their other bills before neglecting the mortgage, because by the time they lost the house they hadn’t had power or water for quite some time and the carpets had been largely destroyed thanks to the buckets of raw sewage that had replaced toilet use. There were broken crack pipes in the cabinets, and the plumbing was in terrible shape. The walls were partially painted mustard yellow over a sickly grey. The dining room ceiling was falling in, and the back porch was rotting. The air conditioning was broken, the front door frame was broken, and the fireplace didn’t work. There were two small bedrooms, one for each of my daughters, but the third place to sleep was an enclosed garage on the bottom floor.
“Try to imagine how it could be,” my realtor said. “If you clean it up and repaint.”
It felt so daunting that I wanted to fall apart. I might have, if I’d felt I had the luxury of doing that. I didn’t know how to turn this nightmare of a place into a home. But I had also not been successful in finding other affordable housing for me and my children.
And now, I told myself, I was a person who did hard things. Even when they sucked. Even when they hurt.
I bought the crack house. My friends helped me make repairs, shampoo the wretched carpet countless times (it never did achieve something I might call cleanliness), scrub out the cupboards, throw away crack pipes, and paint the walls. We set up my daughters in the bedrooms. I put a futon mattress on the concrete floor of the enclosed garage, and that was where I slept. It was brutally hard, viciously discouraging. Years later, my girls would admit that when they first saw the crack house they were dismayed and horrified. But I let them pick the paint colors for their bedrooms, helped them hang their posters, create something new.
I remember painting my kitchen cobalt blue, a color that my ex-husband would have vetoed as too bright, taking breaks only to make dinner, clean it up, take out the trash, and get the kids ready for school the next day. Afterward, covered in paint flecks, I stood on the split linoleum, exhausted, thinking that the work ahead of me felt limitlessly difficult.
Then I thought,
You ran a 5k. You can do this.
Maybe I was stronger than I had allowed myself to consider. Maybe I was more powerful than I’d ever been permitted to see. Maybe I had resources I hadn’t yet tapped into. Probably not. But maybe yes.
