Saying Goodbye to 1,000 Sq Ft Living

Life is extremely funny, and probably even more confusing. My life has basically been spent living in a thousand square foot space, no matter how many times I moved, or where I landed. It was a trend that existed for quite some time, until a little over a year ago.

Life in Los Angeles was hectic, stylish, and downright insane. While one of those things is definitely not like the other, it still remained true. We spent long days, evenings, and weekends on film and commercial sets. Picture the most exciting thing you can think of, yeah, that’s exactly what it felt like. Now, throw in some sweat, exhaustion, and way too much caffeine and you’ll understand what our lives looked like in Hollywood. It was glamorous, and entirely miserable. If this was living, then that meant life sucked. What was it all for? Oh yeah, to buy a house that was bigger than a thousand square feet, and completely ours. This is what dreams are made of, said no one. Except, literally everybody says it, but they’re probably all miserable too.

So, we packed up, hopped on a plane, and flew to Nick’s childhood home and decided to start anew. This time, we lived in a house larger than a thousand square feet, much larger. Not only did this house have more space to spare, it had all the bells and whistles. A woodworking montage was completely possible in this house. I mean a full blown workshop was at the ready, hello to dreams coming true. That was the mentality that occurred when the boat was purchased, and work needed to be done on it. So, now we had this large house that we shared with Nick’s parents, and things were just peachy. Except, yet again they weren’t. This wasn’t our home either, it was his parents. Life didn’t look any different than before, just in a different location and minus the film work. We both were still not satisfied with our lives. You could poke us and we would just bobble around like one of those inflatable men because there was no life in us. So, we decided to move onto the boat and set sail for bluer, and warmer, waters. Amazing! Spectacular! Oh crap, I’m terrified.

We’re moving from this…

Into this

Look, my entire life has been spent in a thousand square foot homes, and now here I was deciding to essentially declutter my life to almost nothing and move into a space that is roughly two hundred square feet. I knew that it was what I wanted, but so many things just swept through my mind and dirtied up every surface in there. If it was what I wanted, why was I scared?

I’ve spent my entire life on one goal and one goal alone. Having a better life than what I had when I grew up. I grew up packed into a 900 square foot house with four other people. While we weren’t dirt poor, we definitely did want for a lot of things. I wanted to ensure that I never ended up like that again, and that my children never had to live through that when they finally existed. So, my entire life has been spent focusing on career in the attempt to amass material wealth. Now I’m piling it all up and getting ready to throw it to the metaphorical wolves. By wolves I mean the people at the dump who will charge me money to throw stuff away. So, we’ve decided to change our entire life trajectory, and live on a boat, on the ocean, away from here. Terrified seems like the perfect word to describe that.

I know it’s the right decision because I can’t wait to get started. I am a storyteller through and through and this is a massive story worth telling. The world is a bountiful place and I want to see it all, and craft new stories in the process. So what that the world has told us this was the wrong thing to do and we should solely focus on career and building a lot of expensive shit. Society has told us a lot of insane things that we should absolutely ignore, so why not this one too? So, while I may be anxious to change the way I’m living, and declutter to the nth degree, I’m more excited than anything. I’m choosing to live instead of work. At the end of my life, I will have experienced a journey only a few people have experienced. That alone is worth the anxiety. So, why not break the mold and focus on the amazing stories that lie ahead. Not in the dump where my old t-shirts land.