Deserving.

"Yes, I've made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it ... I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever." - Stephen King

We bought our house in 2020, sight unseen. It was the real-estate version of an arranged marriage: fingers crossed it all works out, hoping it’s as lovely in person as it is in pictures, but mostly praying it won’t smell funny.

It was my husband who hit the heart on Zillow and saved our future home. I remember scrolling through Zillow side-by-side relentlessly for months and I remember the moment he showed it to me: it was sprawling, beautifully photographed, and in our price range. It wasn’t a mansion by any means, but it wasn’t modest either.

My out-loud reaction was “wow, that’s nice.”

My inside reaction was yeah right.

There was no way this house was going to stay on the market or sell anywhere near its asking price, and certainly no way we – a yoga teacher and a barber/barbershop owner - would be the ones to live in it. The house was predictably/immediately marked sale pending.

But a few weeks later, the house was in between suitors - no longer pending, not officially back on the market either. We swooped in to shoot our shot, throwing everything we had at it (tax returns, cash, dowries, ox, cows) and 3 years ago today, this house became our home. Well, it really belongs to the bank, but we pay the bank back and get to live here.

My mother came to visit. As we walked through the living room and kitchen, talking and marveling at the trees through the windows, I said the thing that I hadn’t said out loud yet: “I feel like I don’t deserve this.”

I don’t deserve this…

How often have those 4 little words been operating in the background? Are they still? Are they running in everyone’s background on some level?

Is it because the work that I do doesn’t feel like work?

Maybe. Maybe it’s because every time I get paid, I am surprised – I am not a yoga teacher for the money, which isn’t much but it’s enough, but it’s not totally selfless either. I do it for the joy. That somehow feels like cheating the system because adulting means spending most of our lives doing something we don’t necessarily love, right? Isn’t suffering a prerequisite to being a member of a capitalist society?

I had internalized these deep, unconscious beliefs as facts. I don’t think I’m alone.

I don’t believe it’s true anymore – that we don’t get to do what we love, and that I don’t deserve “it,” whatever it may be - but I wonder if and when it’s still humming quietly, guiding my behavior and choices, running the show from behind the scenes…

I don’t know. I do know that I’m going to be on the lookout for actions and thoughts rooted in ‘undeserving’, not just for my own sake but for my children’s sake. I can’t pass on wisdom or truth that I don’t have.

I also know this: whatever we do, doing it for the joy and in service to others IS a marker of success, house or no house. At the same time and in the same breath, I am so grateful the house I thought I didn’t deserve is our home.