I lived in the apartment pictured above since July 14, 2014. I moved out this past Tuesday, a heaping mess of emotion and sweat oftentimes carrying items as disparate as a plunger, two sponges, and a dog blanket.
The day I moved out was a day shy of the 14th anniversary of the day I graduated from college. Right after that, a bunch of my friends and I met in upstate New York for kind of like a “guys weekend and who knows what will happen going forward” deal. I was moving to Houston. Another to Arizona, another to Virginia, etc. It wasn’t going to be the same.
You know in moments like that, people talk about the future and what could happen, and yea, throughout that weekend, there were discussions of where life will be in 10, 15, 20 years. Everyone had the same hopes, essentially, even if the career arcs were different: good job, nice wife, kids, home, etc. Markers.
Well, I said all that too — but about 14 years later, I left this apartment because my wife and I split up. So I had to confront an entirely different type of reality, context about my life, role in it, and everything else that comes with it.
I’m not going to talk about the stuff that caused the separation, because that’s not really my story to tell. I will say that a percentage of it, as you would logically assume, was my fault.
I guess I always found this funny: in most middle class families/societal structures, there are three things you’re not really supposed to discuss. Those would be money, sex, and failure. (Religion might be a fourth.)
Think on how weird that is, though. Sex legitimately creates you. Money is tied to the type of life you can have. And we all fail all the time. Right now, in the course of you reading this email, someone has failed at something probably 77,000 times around the world. (I made up that number.)
But look, failure happens. It’s very common. Some companies even learned to embrace it, and out-performed Apple as a stock. That’s hard to do, by the way.
So the first thing I needed to do was embrace failure. Embrace what’s wrong with me, what I could fix, and how I could be better. What specific things could I do in the next three weeks? Three months? Three years?
You want to talk about data-driven anything, being confronted with this is probably the most data-driven time you’ll ever hit.
So here’s the deal: some of these emails going forward will be about this journey, this struggle, this process, this attempted rebuilding of myself. Maybe you’re on this list because you like some of the crap I write, or you think I’m an interesting person. Well, for goddamn sure I am. But this is going to get even more interesting as you see real struggle and real warts across a few emails now and again.
Failure happens. Then, ideally, you bounce back. That’s what the next chapter is about.
And now, a final word on all this: you might see that I often write about some of these psychological issues moreso, like failure at work or the loneliness epidemic in America or just a general feeling of not being good enough. I actually wrote a lot of those in the past few months as my relationship eroded and my sense of self-worth did probably in equal measure.
All these are real issues, though, and we need to talk openly on ’em. Relationships are hard. Work is hard. People are challenging. Life sucks sometimes. It has to be acknowledged, and strategies have to be laid out to move forward. That’s part of my hope here.
In the meantime, be well — and remember, failure is everywhere. It’s OK to reflect on that.
