On Stuff

I used to live in Brooklyn. In a tiny, windowless room in a tiny, overpriced apartment in Bushwick. I had been living in New York City for a little over a year, working at my big-girl job with my big-girl paycheck. It felt really good. 

I had money. Not a lot, but it was mine and it was steady. I was an adult and I was doing adult things. I was paying rent, paying bills, grabbing drinks with friends, going to concerts. I was living in New York. And I loved it. 

This wasn't a life I was used to. I was the first in my family to graduate college, which gave me a paycheck and a steadiness that I wasn't really used to. I grew up in small-town USA, where we drove cars that were 10-years-old and wore hoodies and drank beer in the woods. Where no one really had a lot of money and you'd actually be made fun of for having designer anything. 

And then I went to college, and soon after I moved to New York City, and I met people from alien cultures with alien values. Everyone dressed differently and had different things. I was the only girl that didn't have a blackberry, a coach purse, juicy sweatpants. Stuff that I barely knew existed before my alien encounter. Stuff that I never knew I needed. And suddenly I had the means to get it. 

This is mortifying to publicly admit, but I became obsessed with stuff. Obsessed with the illusory happiness that accompanied all this... shit. But that happiness, if you can even call it that, is vapid. It is one of the only things on this earth that is so completely and so utterly... nothing. It's empty. And that's exactly how it makes you feel.

I'm baring my soul here, and it kind of sucks. But there was once a day in my life, when I had just gotten home to my tiny, overpriced apartment in Brooklyn, and there were multiple packages waiting for me. And I picked them up and got on the elevator to the third floor and I opened my apartment door and I sat down on my living room couch, surrounded by these packages that I didn't even have the desire to open, and I realized that I've never felt more nothing in my life. 

I used to think that stuff was my ticket to happiness.

But stuff is actually the ticket to nothingness. 

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