Leaving the house and keeping the lessons.
A half-burned cedar incense stick my boyfriend brought back from his first trip to Glacier, back when we’d just met, stares at me from its plate. He was worried I’d get bored while he was away, I was worried he’d lose interest in me. Funny how those early seasons of dating warp everything, and how very alien our past selves can feel in the present.
As we pack up the house this morning, I find myself awash in emotions. It's not the kind tied to not wanting to let go of this house. I know in my bones it’s time to release it, but this house has meant so much more than just a place to live. It was my refuge from a life I wanted to leave—burned out, post-hospital, I took refuge hiding in the woods. I’d long felt the pull to leave the noise of the city and suburbs behind for something quieter, gentler. This house was a place to begin again.
It has not only been my home for the past two years—it’s been my teacher. It forced me to confront my financial anxieties, to understand where they came from and how to deal with them. Not always in the gentlest ways, but in the ways that come with buying your own home on a single income in your mid-twenties.
I had a lot of reckoning to do about how I view and manage money. I’d avoided it for most of my life. Not just out of ignorance, though there was some of that, but because I didn’t want to know. Because acknowledging the cracks in a life built on old ideals is deeply uncomfortable. But these were lessons I needed. And God, in His timing, decided I’d learn them here.
The quieter life I asked for? I got it. And in that quiet, I had to face the misalignment in my career, and the deeper truth that money—no matter how much of it—isn’t the end game. Real growth isn’t aesthetic. It’s not the curated version of “slow living” with peaceful mornings and pristine backdrops. True growth is messy. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s shattering. One of my favorite quotes is, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” You don’t get to emerge from the cocoon a new being unless something inside you radically transforms.
And maybe you’re thinking, “Well, the house didn’t do all that.” And you’re right—it didn’t. I did. But the house held the space for it. That’s what makes a house a home, isn’t it? A place that allows you to grow, change, and return to yourself.
This home gave me lessons. And in its sale, it’s also giving me the financial freedom to leave a job that was draining me, and take some time off to rest, to explore new possibilities. I don’t take that privilege lightly. I’m acutely aware of how much pain, work, and growth it took to arrive here.
It’s funny how the very things we chase—status, income, a “dream” house—don’t bring happiness. How fitting that the release of those things becomes the means to freedom.
Life is strange.
And I’m 100% sure God has a sense of humor.
Until next time, my friends—
-Rachel