It was the first week of September, 2014.

I remember the day very clearly. I was starting to get frustrated. The search for my new home had been going on for months, which is pretty reasonable, but there was just something missing from every place I’d seen. I knew it was my first home, not my “forever home,” but I wanted what I wanted and my budget was probably unreasonable.   My realtor was a gem. Mostly because it was a battle to get me to articulate what was missing from the many many places she took me to see, but in some cases it wasn’t always a feature that I hated or was missing but a feeling.  I just didn’t get the vibe I thought you were supposed to get when you’re about to make a significant life decision.

But it was a beautiful day.  Just that perfect September Saturday when summer starts winking at fall.  We all went, the parents wanted to get involved and “offer perspective,” sure. Or my realtor texted my mom because maybe if I had the parent nod of approval I’d pull the trigger and make a decision. I was not all that optimistic about Unit 8G. Why? I can’t tell you, because it had pretty much everything on my “must have list.”  It all looked great online with the overview capturing those keywords you’re scoping for until that “Well, alright” moment happens and you click through to the pictures.  But, I’d been to this neighborhood a few times before to see several other units and had become pretty familiar with the menu.  “It’s quiet. It’s nice.” Just a very vanilla taste.  I like vanilla, I think vanilla is nice.  Key word: “nice.”  What does “nice” even mean anyway? I guess it’s what you say when you’re indifferent but it’s nothing spectacular.  I think that was what it was, they were all just vanilla.

And until that day, it never occurred to me what the problem was.

It started with the usual routine, before she opened the door, my realtor always smiled and said “Ok! Let’s take a look!” and I’d get that fleeting feeling similar to going on a first date when for like five whole seconds you tell yourself “this could be it!” extremely glass half-full, but then reality brings you right back down and you jump to thinking the entire thing is a big waste of time because either his pictures that you spent the entire prior day stalking weren’t that exciting or you’re terrified he’s going to look nothing like that in person.

Well, let’s just say “he” looked exactly like the pictures.  Now, don’t go getting all judgy on me…You know as well as I do we formulate opinions and impressions based on pictures so we have some kind of self-justified perspective when we blindly walk into a new situation. But hopefully, when that happens, a little humility acts as a buffer.  Dating and real estate, totally the same.

So I very slowly made my way through the first floor, just taking in every detail, picking up on things I saw in the pictures. The tile in the foyer, acceptable. The pair of closets sandwiching the front door, adorable. The attached garage with sealed floor and pre-installed pegboard, convenient. The carpet everywhere else, puzzling. The outdated but relatively very clean kitchen, alright. Oh but wait, the appliances were all new, hmm. The kitty-corner “honest-to-god” fireplace, bonus. Backyard access via a sliding glass door, great for Oliver. Omg, look! the pond is right there AND you can hear the fountains, that’s rather soothing.  This wasn’t in the pictures.

Can we turn on the lights, where are the lights in here? Wait, there are no lights, that’s odd.  Actually, I realized it wasn’t odd, because there seemed to be a very apparent reason there were no lights in the living room.  Floor to ceiling mirrors covering all the living room walls.  It was the kind of thing you just couldn’t help but just keep staring at trying to figure out what the thought process was there.  It drove me nuts not knowing why they ever thought that was an excellent life decision. Perhaps an 80s thing, I concluded adding lights to that equation would’ve been blinding.

 

So I’m staring at the floor to ceiling mirrors running through the surrounding inventory.  The sliding glass door is still open so the fountains are playing the background melody while my realtor is asking me, “So what do you think?” and I’m also wondering, “Where is my mother, I can’t hear her commentary,” meanwhile my phone gripped tightly in my hand is vibrating, “The Professor,” and for a moment everything went blank.  White noise quiet with a muted echoing pond.  I didn’t pass out or anything so dramatic, I just disconnected ever so briefly.  Totally zoned out so you’re borderline dreaming wide-awake.

It became very clear what my problem was with every other unit. There was always something I couldn’t get past, no vision, “it is what it is,” just vanilla.  And here it was, floor to ceiling mirrors. Literally staring me right in the face.  I hated the mirrors…But they were just mirrors.  The mirrors can come down.  I can change this, I change what I see. The symbolism was a little ridiculous, but to this day I swear it was that moment and those hideous mirrors that sold me.

Like I said, there’s always an event.

Yes. This is enough.

Reply: (squinty eyes, blush-faced smiling emoji) found it. Send.

It was simple really. This place may have been vanilla, but it wasn’t just vanilla. If I wanted, I could make it taste just like Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean amongst a whole aisle of store brand vanilla. It would be mine, and that was the difference.

“So how about we go take a look at the upstairs!”

Queue legit LOL (right…the upstairs), “Sure…”

“You’re doing this by yourself? But why? How do you know what you’re doing?”

…when you wake up one day to discover a large majority of the life you built from scratch doesn’t exist anymore, it changes a person. I’m a person that looked at the world in terms of sparks and events. A ‘spark’ by itself is magical and harmless, but a warning. In specific surroundings one spark can ignite.  And I mean that both literally and figuratively, but for this train of thought, mostly figuratively, I hope. If the spark ignites, what happens is what I call an ‘event.’ An event to me is a specific monumental occasion that presents itself after a series of smaller moments that leave you with a lingering question. Examples: is this job really worth all the stress, is this boyfriend really “the one,” should I cut my hair? etc.  You’ll notice it’s always a yes or no question, and it’s intentional.  These questions remain unanswered in your mind until the event. Enter event; and lingering question answered, almost always.  If it doesn’t answer the question, it isn’t the event.  It’s usually definitive without hesitation, but if you’re like me the most indecisive person ever questioning every everything ever, there is a contingency reassurance question.  And the question is always the same. Enough?

At least this is the way it always worked for me. Worked, because like me, the person who was changed, how I perceived everything also changed in the “after.” But I think that’s okay…

Let’s rewind and start from the beginning…

“Before”

A backstory might help so you have a little perspective to follow. Here’s the bullet starting seven years ago: 2009- finish college as a genetic’s major, internship at one of the world’s top cancer hospitals; 2010-job at same world-renowned hospital doing cutting-edge research and development; 2011-2013- grad school for management “to understand the bigger picture,” get published a couple times; 2014- leave big city world-renowned hospital five years later to manage a startup lab back home for awesome dollars aka “gig as the boss”, and do pretty well at that for a while.

I bought my condo in October 2014.  It was a big deal for me, one of biggest decisions I’d ever made.  The second those papers were signed I immediately changed the things I knew would prevent me from being comfortable in my very first new home.  It wasn’t anything major. I had floor-to-ceiling mirrors removed from my living room. “Good-bye 1980s.” I painted the whole first floor all the very same blah neutral color. “Because it goes with everything.” I changed all the brass door knobs to brushed nickel.  “Obviously.”  And then my mother showed up and minimally decorated one day. So I moved in and went about my life of doing science and being the boss and not really worrying about all the other things I wanted to change.  As a workaholic I didn’t spend an enormous amount of time enjoying my new found space.  I use that word ‘space’ specifically because I went from a tiny shoebox studio apartment in NYC, then home to the parent’s house for a few months, now to my new place housing all these rooms I didn’t even know what to do with.  Most days I came home to little Oliver, and my canine bff and I probably had a bite to eat sitting at the peninsula bar attached to my kitchen.  After that we would just binge watch the latest Netflix craze upstairs in bed and fall asleep.  Repeat every day.

Sure, I was happy I was in my own place, it seemed the logical step for where I was in life, but it didn’t feel like mine.  The things I asked myself whether or not I should change still lingered in the back of mind, but there was just no time, and they seemed too daunting to tackle. Looking back I think that’s why I didn’t invite my friends over, do any entertaining ever, or post relentless #newhomeowner pictures. I wasn’t ready yet, my home wasn’t ready yet.  So without any events to answer whether I should make the changes, I wasn’t ready to invite my people over to a place I was already uncomfortable in.  I’d like to think subconsciously I was saving those moments for the “after.”

Before the “after”…

2015-That workaholic career in science I had built from scratch started to throw sparks a year into the new gig as the boss. “Things” at work started to go down a very scary road in what I can only describe as being in the middle of the arctic wilderness at night without a flashlight or anyone around.  If you knew my friends, they would probably tell you that over the course of six months I slowly started losing my mind.

So I found a little distraction from freezing in the wilderness and got myself new boyfriend. It was great, he was great, everything (except work) was great, I had no complaints through spring and into summer.

I appeared on the news for kicking off “the first of its kind” scientific study for work.  It seemed like the ducks were in a row just swimming right along.

And then all at once, too many sparks. The boyfriend decides I’m not “wife material,” there is an event to revival all prior events at work forcing me to resign, I have a nervous breakdown, and what seemed like my entire world, everything I thought I knew about my life, was consumed by an inferno.  Too much smoke to breathe or see through, so I just left.  I packed everything I owned into garbage bags and fled to Cape Cod, the one place I knew would bring back some sunshine.

After…

Six weeks later, I came back home, back to my condo.  The one that didn’t feel like mine. That hadn’t changed. Having no job and not really in any mental capacity to start looking for another one in the wake of not being okay with what happened, really not being okay in general, all those things I wondered about whether I should change bothered me, they kept me awake at night. This condo was all that was left that was still mine, and I realized I had some time to fill,some money saved for a rainy day, and sparks were flying.  But these sparks were different, they came not from a place of self-doubt and wondering, but from a very loud and decisive, “let’s do this” new land entirely.

And so began the spiraling of events of what has turned into the best experience of my entire life, something I like to call, “Reconstruction: Talia Does DIY.”  People thought I was crazy. People didn’t understand.  It seemed perfectly logical to me.  My world collapsed, and out of the rubble I intended to rebuild the entire thing from scratch, by myself, exactly the way I wanted it, starting with my outdated condo.