Homebody & Heart

I want to tell you how I got here, but to do that I have to tell you where I was.

I started drinking in my late teens, and by my early twenties, I was hiding it. White wine only, because at least it didn’t leave a stain around my lips. Pink plastic cups, because nobody could see what was actually in them. I was in control of it, or so I told myself, for about ten years.

By twenty-nine, I wasn’t hiding anything anymore. I was living above the bar where I worked in Seattle, sneaking downstairs between shifts to steal well tequila. Drinking on breaks. Smoking enough weed every day that Snoop Dogg would’ve told me to take it down a notch. My whole life was the kind of quiet chaos that runs on maintenance and denial.

On July 26, 2016, I didn’t plan to wake up.

I did wake up, obviously. But I was blacked out, drunk, on drugs, and I couldn’t hide it anymore. Everyone could see exactly how bad it had gotten. I was probably going to lose my job. Probably my friends. Probably more. My friend called my therapist, a woman I adored who called me honey buns in the voice of a gentle grandmother, and she told me I had to leave Seattle or I wasn’t going to make it out alive. Somebody called my parents. My friend made me bring my cat, thank God, because if they hadn’t I probably would have left him behind.

I packed a bag. In it: a handful of clothes that made no sense for the weather, a 24 pack of Rainier, some Xanax I had stolen from my boyfriend (at the time), and a bottle of tequila. I was coming to Tacoma to dry out for the weekend. Get my head right. Then go back.

That was almost ten years ago. I never went back.

I went through withdrawals in the bedroom downstairs at my parents’ house. It didn’t have a window, so technically it was a large closet. It smelled. I shook. I’m glad I didn’t die.

I don’t share this lightly. I share it because this blog is called Homebody & Heart, and you deserve to know where the homebody part actually comes from. It didn’t come from childhood. It didn’t come from me being a naturally cozy person who loved throw pillows. It came from getting sober and being too afraid to leave the house.

For a long stretch, I was agoraphobic. Not in a cute way. I couldn’t go to the grocery store by myself. I couldn’t be seen. I was so ashamed of who I had been and what I had done that I genuinely didn’t feel like I deserved to exist in public. I felt like a nobody. I got mad at my mom when she didn’t want to go to the store with me. I felt betrayed when my best friend moved to another state, like how dare she, where was I supposed to go now. I needed independence more than I could admit, and I had no idea how to build it.

So I stayed home. I got sober. I noticed things. Morning light. An organized drawer. The way it felt to sit in a quiet room and not be running from it. I became a homebody by necessity, and then, eventually, by choice.

That’s the homebody part. Here’s the heart part.

I have wanted to be in real estate since I was thirteen years old, playing The Sims for the first time in 2000. I didn’t care about the little people. I wanted to build the houses. Decades later, it’s still the only thing that has never stopped sounding interesting to me.

The day I actually signed up for real estate school, I was working from home at the law firm. I had the on-call phone, and it had been relentless. I hadn’t showered, hadn’t changed out of my pajamas, and barely had time to think. It was 2pm. I was supposed to attend a Zoom webinar about the real estate program I’d been eyeing, but I canceled my registration because I was too tired to imagine doing one more thing.

My phone rang. I assumed it was a potential client asking about a DUI or a DV charge. I was wrong. It was the school. A man named Martin, who I had actually talked to YEARS earlier when I first started looking into real estate, was calling because he’d seen I canceled. He asked if I still had my login info. I did. I think that was the moment he clocked something in me. Grit, maybe. I’d held onto that login for years; through all the reasons I told myself I couldn’t do it yet. He told me I’d make a good agent. He walked me through signing up, told me I didn’t need the most expensive package, and helped me pick the fully virtual option.

I paid my first installment right there.

I went downstairs and told my parents I had just signed up for real estate school. My dad, standing in the kitchen, said: “Why?”. My mom was happy for me, or at least did a decent impression of it.

I had spent years doing things for other people and not getting so much as a thank you. That day I did something for me. Just for me. No one asked me to and no one was going to clap for it.

I didn’t just choose real estate. It aligned with who I was becoming.

And here I am. Licensed realtor. Solo agent. Building a business in public, sometimes sobbing in the bread aisle trying to reach escrow, sometimes nailing it, usually both in the same day. Some days I feel like Bambi trying to stand for the first time. Wobbly, shaky, not entirely sure where the legs go. But standing.

Everything about my life, getting sober, becoming a homebody, learning to notice, learning to stay, learning to be seen again, was preparing me for this.

I didn’t just choose real estate. Real estate was waiting for me to finally choose myself.

And I finally did.