An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #15: Growing Up (originally aired May 30, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
We got rid of a lot of stuff when we left New York. We could only keep what fit in the Jeep. That was it. So it required eliminating a lot of possessions that I previously felt defined my success.
I used to have an apartment in Tribeca, and then on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I had photos of my travels around the world professionally enlarged and framed and hanging on the walls so that any time someone came over they would see all the beautiful places I’ve been and all the great experiences I had there. Because at the time, I needed other people to recognize it in order for me to feel good about it.
I wasn’t feeling it inside of myself for a lot of reasons. So I had it hanging around me. As much as it was there for friends and family I invited over, it was probably just as much, if not more, for me. Coming home every day, or sitting at home working, being surrounded by that on my walls. It reinforced what I couldn’t acknowledge about myself or about my life.
But over the last few years it’s been about eliminating that stuff. Yeah, I spent a lot of money to get those photos enlarged and framed. OK. That’s money I’m never going to see again. But I don’t have those photos with me anymore. That’s no longer a part of my life. And now we live in a furnished rental. None of the furniture is ours. Almost none of the artwork on the walls is ours.
We have our own stuff in the cabinets, the drawers and the shelves. That’s pretty much it. And we’re now talking about buying a sailboat and living aboard. It’s something we’ve wanted to do pretty much since the beginning. But we weren’t ready. It was way too painful to think about having that little in our lives.
Even though the purchase of a sailboat is a lot and it’s much more than either of us own right now, there’s quite a bit less that you’re capable of having in your day-to-day life if you live on a sailboat. There just isn’t a storage space.
I have hardly anything of a wardrobe left at this point because of all the times we’ve moved around. But I’m going to have to have even half of what I have now.
So that’s growth in the opposite direction of what we typically think of as growth. How do you measure that? And how do you show for it? I don’t know that there’s a way to outwardly demonstrate it to others.
Maybe just the presence of a sailboat in our lives will be a way for me to point and say, “See? We live on this. See how I went from living in a sweet pad in New York to this? See how much I’ve changed?” Instead, I’m starting to believe — I’m not living it yet, but I’m starting to believe — that the only way I can show who I am is in the way I act, in the way I treat people.
What’s really hard about hanging your hat on that is that we fuck up all the time. I fuck up in the way that I treat people, in the way I handle myself, in the way I carry myself, in how I present to the world, all the time. We all do. And if I don’t have any of the typical possessions and typical cues of my success, and I’m basically saying, “You know what I want to be the demonstration of my growth? How I act every day.” Then I’m really opening myself up to a whole lot of criticism — from myself, especially — because I don’t have the photo on the wall to remind me of X, Y and Z.
All I have is how I behaved today, how I am right now.
An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #15: Growing Up (originally aired May 30, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
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