Burning a Bad Habit
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“It’s meant to be.”
“Life has a funny way of working itself out.”
We’ve all heard these cliches. They creep up on us during two extremes in life: tragedy and good fortune. Laid off from your job or got an offer for a new one? Everything happens for reason, right?
I have to be blunt and give full disclosure: I usually call bullshit on these serendipitous phrases. Perhaps not to the speaker’s face; I’m not a total jerk. I smile and nod, say the appropriate and socially acceptable response and move on with the conversation. Internally, my eye roll rivals that of any 13-year-old girl arguing with her mother. I can’t even, I’m thinking. This may sound a bit harsh and cynical, and it kind of is. My being is rooted in the practicality of life. I see the world in a realistic and literal sense that often hinders me in my creative pursuits. I work past it when necessary, but it is at the heart of who I am. So when a friend or relative says one of these ubiquitous phrases to me, I feel like shouting at them, “No, life doesn’t just work itself out. Things get worked out by people. Things are not meant to be. People work hard and things happen as a result of that. And sometimes even when they work hard and do all the right things, bad things still happen to them. This is the way the world works.” I’m so sure of it. Until I’m not, of course.
Almost one month ago, my husband and I came home from a Lowe’s shopping trip on a Sunday afternoon to a cloud of smoke rising from our rental house. We’d just dropped about $1,200 on new washer and dryer for it. We’d moved in 3 weeks prior. The landlord’s handyman was on the roof, showering it with our garden hose.
“Is that smoke? What is he doing?” I said to my husband, Carlos, cautiously.
“I don’t know, I’m not sure what he’s doing.” He replied, also sounding very nervous about the scene unfolding before us.
“Maybe it’s like, part of what he has to do to fix the roof?” There was a small leak in the roof before we had moved in, and he had come to fix it that day while we were out. But this was not a routine repair. This was a full-on fire, its billowy smoke rising from the center of our house, growing thicker and darker by the second — which aptly described my state of mind at the time as well. Within about a minute of us pulling up, we heard sirens rounding the corner. A fire truck pulled up right in front of the house. And then another one. And then one more. This is where my anxiety and general lack of “grace under fire” kicked in. A general freak-out ensued.
Holy shit. This is like, the real thing. I remember thinking. A million thoughts were flying through my brain: our clothes, our computers, our stuff. “How did this even happen?!”
After the fire had been put out, the firemen let us in to retrieve any personal items we wanted. We would not be living there any time soon, according to the Fire Chief. Carlos went in first, and came back out before I stepped inside.
“Brace yourself.” He said to me. I nodded.
The ceiling inside the combined dining and living area was on the floor in a pile of rubble. More piles toppled our dining room table and other pieces of furniture in the area. Everything was soggy. It smelled like we crawled inside a pit smoker and shut the lid. Looking around, I knew we were lucky. Things could have been so much worse. Our personal property wasn’t damaged by the actual fire, but it was damaged by the hundreds of gallons of water pumped into the roof and the amount of smoke distributed throughout the house. Ironically, the night before, I had brought out almost every framed photograph and piece of art we owned into the living area, and stacked it neatly against the walls in preparation for an epic gallery wall. Custom framed prints, gifts from friends, gig posters and limited edition pieces. Now, most of the glass was shattered and the precious contents water damaged, covered in soggy drywall. That’s life, throwing up a giant, stiff middle finger to my carefully laid plans.
We packed up what we could and drove to my parents’ house, two hours away. Carlos made a trip to Walmart at 9 pm that night to buy us some clean clothes — everything we owned smelled like barbecue. His sense of humor still intact, he picked up a Bob Marley commemorative t-shirt for me, in all of its $7.99 glory. It was itchy, but I fell asleep anyway, mentally and physically exhausted.
The next few weeks were a haze. There was a ton of “coordinating” to be done to get things back to normal. We inventoried our property, hauled some of it to storage and threw the unsalvageable in the garbage. We looked around at all of our stuff. There was just so much of it.
Where did we get all of this? Why do we have so much stuff?
As we frantically searched for a new place to live, we talked about the sheer amount of material goods we had acquired together over the past 6 years. We also had tough conversations about what we could afford versus what we should spend. If we put some effort in, we could save more money and be smarter about how we spent it. I was in awe of how easy it had been to continue buying and discarding so much frivolous junk. Our spaces overflowed and our answer to that problem was finding a bigger place to live to store all of our things. We tucked things into nooks and crannies and told ourselves we had cause to keep useless items.
I really like this thing. I might need it some day, when I get around to doing that thing I always say I want to do that I never actually do. But I’ll probably do it soon.
Where does that voice come from, the one that convinces you that without a doubt, you will deeply regret tossing that thing you’ve kept in a box on the highest shelf in your closet for two years, in the garbage? Surely, days later, you will find the perfect use for said item. And you’ll be so angry with yourself for throwing it out. How could you? Just keep it awhile longer. What’s the harm?
While we were displaced, I thought a lot about the lifestyle we’d grown accustomed to living. We consumed, bought, discarded, curated and collected. I realized that it wasn’t that big of a deal to wear the same 4 outfits to work over and over again. I missed our stuff a little. But it wasn’t the thing that stressed me out. I stressed out about not having a home, in the symbolic sense. A place to come to at the end of the work day or after a night out. A place to be lazy all day on a Sunday. A place to moonlight as a writer. I realized that I really can live without all that stuff. Not having it didn’t change how I operated or felt day-to-day. It felt liberating to get rid of a lot of it, even though the circumstances weren’t so great. After the fire, it was easy to donate the dress I haven’t worn in two years. Or the 17 t-shirts that I kept in a drawer just in case I needed an extra one to wear to the gym on laundry day.
The physical loss of “stuff” was balanced with a renewed faith in humans. Between friends and family, we were offered a myriad of lodging options from which to choose. Guest rooms, home office futons, a sofabed — people were more than happy to open up their homes to us in crisis. My boss gave me as much time as I needed to figure things out without having to worry about being at work at 9 a.m. every morning. Text messages offering hot meals rolled in the for the first week. Something critical occurred during this process: We realized that when someone offered us a concrete and specific favor, it was so much easier to accept their help. In a vulnerable situation, most people are on guard and trying to retain whatever dignity and pride they have left. When you specifically offer up what you can do to help, you take the burden of asking for help away from them. Next time someone I know is in need, I will make a deliberate effort to be specific about how I can help — they will probably have enough to worry about without having to brainstorm ways in which they think I might be able to help them.
Several people used a variation of one of the opening phrases I listed for this article in response to our situation. I didn’t have the mental energy for my usual internal monologue at the time. But as time has passed, I realized that I sort of agree with them. I’m not happy about what we had to go through, but we are better off where we ended up. I don’t think we would have recognized the grotesque level of consumption we’d been practicing without the jolt of almost losing it all to make us snap out of it. It was a royal pain to get from that first “homeless” night to our new place, but with the help of our generous and gracious family, friends and coworkers, we are focused on the kind of life we want to have instead of focusing on the stuff that fills it up. We got to hit the reset button — to some extent. We still have our fair share of stuff. But its purpose and place in our life is clear. It no longer serves as a source of joy or fulfillment, instead it’s (mostly) functional. We need chairs, so we’ll buy some chairs that we like. I’ll sit in one and write something that matters.
