The Veruvian Van

The post therapy session cool down often feels like I’m driving a packed U-Haul truck with no brakes, and most of the time I see that simile as having two basic parts: something about storage and something about momentum. This morning, though, I woke up from an unsettling dream (in which I cheated on my girlfriend and had to move out) to a third thought on it, which is that U-Haul has been a part of most of my formative and/or horrible moments. In fact, there might not be a company that has had a closer seat to the specific logistics of my various successes and miseries.

Obviously, that angle could be a bit of a brand fix for them but what I chewed on for a bit with my coffee early this morning was something more personal, which is that much of my struggle with moving on has been accepting that I have to take some of it with me. For most of my life my central fantasy was being someone else, and now that I’m getting more comfy with the probably-beautiful truth that we never fully get to start over, I’m more grateful for anything that helps me move my boxes from one place to the next. For instance Shonda, my therapist who should probably be charging me by the word, telling me this week that I’m allowed to stop trying to change myself. I’ve heard that probably a hundred thousand times, but I haven’t really been listening until recently and for some reason this specific time brought a life-shifting amount of relief. And even then, I know that a part of me will probably always be trying to forget that sort of advice, partially because I’m half wild animal and partially because most of my success has come from ignoring conventional wisdom. What a weird, funny trip.

Whoever I am now and whoever I am next, I’ll always have some of that same paradoxical stuff somewhere in the rented trunk or covered truck. And at some point, reflecting back on my life (if I get to) will probably produce a map of the moments that moved me across state lines, both literal and otherwise. I’m not saying that sort of output should be sponcon, but I did want to pause and pay homage to one of the mechanical circuits that drive a great deal of our real change. Growth is never really about abstraction. It is always a time and it is always a place, and it always comes with a certain amount of self-handed me downs and older furniture to help fill up the space.