The month everything I owned imploded

This fall was weird, y'all.

At 8:10pm on September 27th, I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside a fancy restaurant, in a fancy dress, staring at what was left of my Volkswagen Golf.

It was my final week with Em & Friends. I’d been consulting with them since the company was acquired in 2022, but I’d decided to leave my gig a few months early, because my heart and intuition and body told me it was time to go. It was an impractical choice; I was leaving income on the table, and the work was easy. But I didn’t have to stay, and I’m done with letting my mind use fear disguised as practicality in order to override what the rest of me needs. So I said to hell with the money—despite the loud protests of my rational mind—and walked away.

That night, while we’d been inside the fancy restaurant toasting to the final, for real, closure of this 12-year chapter of my life and identity, a driver in a stolen car plowed into and destroyed my little black VW that had been parked on the street outside, abandoned their also-totaled vehicle at the scene (hazards flashing politely!), and took off on foot. My car, which was paid off, had 40,000 miles on it.

A few days earlier, my not-very-old computer and phone had both met sudden and inexplicable ends. The computer screen started flashing and wouldn’t stop. The phone refused to turn on. I didn’t drop them or spill coffee on them or throw them off a bridge; they just fell over and died.

Car, phone, computer, gone. Final week of work. These were the three things I owned that were originally company property.

“Weird,” I thought, “but maybe not that weird at all?”

But also, fuck.

A week later, our cat Bryan executed the truly spectacular feat of 1) turning on the bathtub located in our second floor bedroom¹ and 2) knocking the sprayer onto the hardwood floor, resulting in water pouring directly into what is best described as “pretty much our entire house” for nine hours. We were blissfully unaware until that evening, when my partner Daniel was working in the basement and noticed a large puddle seeping ominously from under a shelving unit.

Hello, I will turn on your water but I definitely won’t turn it off and I also won’t be sorry.

Water mitigators showed up at 10:30 at night and cut holes in the walls and ceilings and placed gigantic, industrial fans and dehumidifiers in every room, except for one child’s bedroom and my office, which is also our guest room. Daniel and I moved into the office/guest room with our cats (yes Bryan is still with us, does anyone want a cat, I am joking sort of) because the rest of the house was 100 degrees and sounded like an active runway.

For eight days, various contractors were in and out with dismal updates: there was asbestos in the ceiling. There was, strangely, no insulation in an exterior wall. There was, even more strangely, also no insulation in the walls or roof of our bedroom, but there were two layers of plywood and random scraps of wood piled behind all the drywall, like the remodeling equivalent of a kid who cleans their room by shoving all their clothes under the bed.

During this period, the teenage children, who drive a 14-year-old Subaru Impreza², came home and said “something’s wrong with our car” and we said “what” and one of them said “smoke is coming from the engine and it was making a weird sound and a light came on” and we said “and you drove it home?” and he said “yes is that bad?” And then he went to sleep in the basement because he didn’t have a bedroom wall.

Two days later, something went wrong with Daniel’s truck—our only car—and it had to go to the mechanic.

Phone, computer, car, house, other car, truck, in the span of three weeks. The whole thing felt supernatural, or biblical, or like a bad Tom Hanks movie from the 80s. A few hours after picking up the rental sedan, I was backing it out of a grocery store parking spot when someone pulled out without looking.

Instead of offering a quick, polite honk like a normal person, I laid on the horn and started to scream, making animal sounds more than words, which would definitely have been less awkward if Daniel and his parents hadn’t also been in the car.

I gunned it out of the parking lot, crying and yelling many things that were all versions of NO and WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING and I NEED THIS SHIT TO STOP and OH MY GOD IN-LAWS, I’M SORRY I’M LIKE THIS.

Everyone said it was okay, but the ride home was very quiet.

I believe that when you (I, we) make a decision in the direction of healing, or the breaking of a pattern, things tend to appear in one’s path that challenge one’s choice. Like a series of tests to see if you really mean it.

For the couple of weeks after this series of events unfolded, I was afraid to leave the house. My good friends were texting me daily to make sure there were no new crises of destruction. I updated my will and double checked all our insurance coverage. I washed the dishes, folded laundry, made dinner, mentally repeating “this is a test, this is a test.”

I do not believe everything happens for a reason. I believe things happen, and then we get to decide what, if anything, those events mean in our lives in a larger sense. We also get to decide what to do with what life hands us. When life hands us what appears to be a box of garbage, it’s critical to let ourselves be sad and mad about it for as long as we need to, before attempting to alchemize it into wisdom or perspective.

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Dr. Steven Hayes, teaches that feeling anger, sadness, or grief over a loss, or a hurtful or stressful event in your life, is called “clean pain.” Clean pain is necessary and unavoidable; allowing ourselves to feel those emotions is required in order to eventually move forward and heal.

The other kind of pain is called “dirty pain,” which is suffering caused by our painful thoughts about a situation or event. For example, someone breaks up with you. Missing them and feeling sad about the end of the relationship is clean pain. Dirty pain is thinking, “See, this is proof that I’m broken and destined for a life of loneliness.”

Our prefrontal cortex enables us to do a lot of really cool stuff, but also causes us a fair amount of suffering. It’s why we’re able to make meaning from things—accurate or not—and it’s also the reason we get stuck in the past or the future, or latch onto a thought and use it as brain fodder for spiraling into painful and inaccurate conclusions about ourselves and the world. It’s a great storyteller—but a lot of the time, its stories are bullshit.

I went to elementary school with a kid named David Conley. Everyone really liked David Conley, but he was infamous for telling really outrageous lies, like Michael Jackson was his cousin (David was a white kid from Massachusetts) or that his grandfather invented corduroy. He was deeply committed to these stories, and he’d take great offense when questioned, which also made him very convincing. Wait, maybe Michael Jackson is his cousin? He was funny and smart, but we all knew his information couldn’t always be trusted.

Basically, our prefrontal cortexes are David Conley. They’ll make meaning and tell us stories, many of which are untrue. The trick is in learning to decide which ones to believe.

The simultaneous destruction of all my most expensive possessions came at an extreme cost and hassle.³ I let myself be sad and (really, really) mad about it. But when I felt the familiar anxiety spiral coming, I asked the question: what are you making this mean?

I came up with three possible options:

1. This means nothing, life is random, what a wild series of coincidences!

2. This is clearly a sign you shouldn’t have quit your job, idiot. Everything will always be hard, and here’s proof. Get back to work; it’s on you to pay for all this. Also, don’t forget you have a brain tumor, which is unrelated but it’s something else to be anxious about!

3. You’re in the process of shedding a skin that doesn’t fit you anymore, and becoming someone new. Major transformation requires large-scale inner and outer destruction. You’ve been writing all year about what wants to die and throwing stuff in the fire. Sorry about all your shit, that’s a bummer. But it’s a necessary part of the plan.

I had the option to either look at this string of losses as evidence of life being unfair and random, or as evidence of me being on my path of integrity. And the thing is, there’s no way to prove that either position is right or wrong. There’s no objective truth besides “this happened, then this happened, then this.” Everything else, all the meaning and mythology attached to it, is up for interpretation.

This is my wish for us all: May our desire to become more of ourselves always be greater than the safety found in the familiar embrace of a painful old story.

2024 is a year of new beginnings for me, so please stay tuned for more on the way! If you found your way here from elsewhere and you haven’t subscribed yet, almost all new posts are free to read, we have an awesome community here, and this is the way to keep up with my work now that I’m off Instagram.

To all my readers: thanks, as always, for being here.

1. We live in a 1950s bungalow in which the second floor (formerly the attic) has been converted to the primary bedroom. A previous homeowner decided it would be cute to put a clawfoot tub in the bedroom. It is cute! But it would be a lot cuter if they’d also decided to put tile underneath it. Instead, it sits directly on a hardwood floor.

2. which they refer to with straight faces as a “sports car” lols

3. For most of my life, this sequence of events would have bankrupted me. I now have the resources to be able to absorb all this and still be OK (and homeowners insurance is covering the house) and for this I am tremendously grateful.