What rebuilding a house can teach you about rebuilding a life.

Have you ever lived in a home while it’s under construction? I have… It’s hellish.

Everything is always a mess and disorganized. Cardboard boxes are stacked in the corners, some open and rummaged through to find some essential missing items. Others remain sealed, concealing their contents from the world, forgotten. A layer of fine dust blankets everything in the home. Trying to wipe it away is like trying to wipe away fog. You work all day to make money needed to pay the mortgage and to fund the endless remodeling projects. Then you come home in the evenings just to put your work clothes on and paint, scrub, scrape, demolish, build, and sand while hastily ingesting take-out until you fall into bed exhausted just to wake up the next day and do it all over again for weeks or months on end.
This is the image that came to mind after my 24 year marriage ended in divorce. My life was messy and disorganized. I lived out of storage facilities. I no longer had many of the comforts that previously surrounded me, they had been left behind in my hasty “escape” from my marriage and home. My mind was a fog with “what the hell just happened?” I replayed it endlessly, overthinking myself into oblivion. I was exhausted by the depression, the anxiety about my past, my present and my future. I was also working full time, trying to take care of myself (self-care can be an elusive concept when you’ve just taken care of others for so long) while also doing the overwhelming work of self-reflection, analyzing, healing, therapy and processing your feelings. What the hell does that even mean anyway?

What brought this word picture to my mind you ask? (You didn’t but I’m going to tell you) I had an epiphany. I wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park. I had wanted to for years. So one day during a particularly slow time at work I decided to see how hard it would be to get a campsite. To my surprise there were many campsites available for the middle of July! A peak time to visit because of the amicable weather. I did a little research on the different campgrounds and sites, picked dates, filled out the information and then…. My finger hovered over the ‘Book It’ button. I hesitated. The room around me melted into a haze as my mind left the present and entered a different dimension. All the thoughts started to flood my mind. All the feeling started to well up in my chest first, then tightened in my throat and sent a chill down my spine. Tiny beads of sweat materialized on my upper lip. My entire body had a visceral reaction. “Do I really have to do this by myself? Do I want to do it by myself? It’s so hard to get anyone to do what I want to do. I always do what everyone else wants to do. This sucks! I hate this! I hate being single, on my own, lonely. Doing things and going places by myself! AAAAAHHHHHH!! I slammed the computer shut and went home and went straight to bed. I cried all evening, alone. I was angry, I was sad, deflated, discouraged, blah blah blah. Therapy told me to name my feelings so as to better understand them and cope with them. I didn’t feel like it was hard to understand at this point and knowing I was all of those things didn’t seem to help me cope. They were just there. I suppose I thought coping meant they would go away. That’s not the case.

The next morning after a fitful night’s sleep, I lay there in bed. It was 5:00am, dark and quiet. My mind had quieted and my thoughts drifted. That’s when I thought of the above scenario. The epiphany! The AHA! Moment. I was in fact living in a construction zone. My life had been demolished. What made living in a construction zone doable, endurable, was that you were building something you wanted. You had dreamed and imagined and cut pictures out of magazines, pinned on Pinterest, whatever. You were making a vision come to life. It was still hell but there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I could do the same. As scary and uncomfortable as it is, I could build whatever I wanted. But I had been just surviving and building a life for others for so long, that I didn’t even know where to begin. What kind of life did I even want? I wanted to be safe in my home surrounded by my kids, happy, but that was not possible.
I knew only one other thing… I wanted to go to Yellowstone. I opened my computer, restored the page for the campground reservation and hit “Book It”.

BOOM! All the depression went away and excitement overtook me. I was going to do this even if I had to do it alone. It’s my life now and I’m not waiting around for someone else to come along on my journey. I was going to take my journey and if someone wanted to come along with me then great!

As it turned out a close friend did in fact come along with me and that was an adventure in its own right. A story of overcoming adversity. But that’s for next time.

What I learned from this epiphany was that my life was mine to build. I could build a den of dark self pity with gray walls and few windows to let the light in. Or, I could “Winchester Mystery House” the shit out of my life. Just start building and see what sticks. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing except unlike the Winchester Mystery House, it’s not a life built from fear and superstition. It’s a life being built from hope, adventure, and pure tenacity. Sometimes it rambles a little. Some remodeling projects get abandoned, some get reworked and expanded, some new projects enter the imagination and become “next on the list”. But at every twist and turn I am building a life I want. One that helps me want to get out of bed every day and go on. One that gives me something positive to talk about with others instead of ranting on and on about my ex or the injustices I suffered. A life that slowly and deliberately is replacing the surviving I had been doing with something else. What exactly will this remodeling project end up looking like? I’m not sure but I can tell you this. There are plenty of places that let in the light. It’s full of bright color and peaceful vignettes. The rooms are filled with people who love me, support me and fill me with positivity. Every room of this project is a perfect reflection of Feng Shui in living form.

My life is still under construction. If you’d like to see what I build next subscribe and come along for the joy, encouragement, positivity, ideas… basically all the things I will build.