The Apartment Girl for Whom the Earth Moved.

​Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash

In 1994, I was an apartment gal in Southern California. More valley than Hollywood, but close enough to smell and live the ethos of striving and progress. That was the year the Northridge 6.7 magnitude earthquake, an act of God (as I like to call her), catapulted me from a two-bedroom apartment to a townhouse. At that point, I could not fathom the notion that one day I would live in an actual home because, you see, I was nothing if not a dyed-in-the-wool apartment gal.  

Apartment gals are known for taking baby steps. We don't rush, headlong, into change. In my case, I could only tolerate tiny, toddler, tottering half-steps. I was conditioned, courtesy of  Mother, to regard full steps as indulgent. Coincidentally, SoCal apartment gals are known for taking small bites (whilst taking small steps) and locking themselves up for fear of being too fat. (But that's another post/story/chapter -- there's more where that came from.)

My progression—from first apartment to first home—was glacial. This hewed to my identity as an apartment gal: we scare easily. I vegetated in my first apartment, like a piece of celery or, on a good day perhaps a baby carrot ... not yet graduating to full carrot (and never, never crudité with ranch dressing). Apartment gals do not take a bite our of life. They nibble. 

In hindsight, I have no idea how I nibbled my way out. 

I went from a cavernous, dank, drug-infested, one-bedroom “flat,” to a a brand new, cheerful one bedroom with unfortunate neighbors whose proclivity was to blast loud music at three a.m. On the regular. It's not like they were with the band. They were just rude. This ancillary, but unavoidable, downside led me to the aforementioned, two-bedroom apartment. It was a big step, but a safe one, for this apartment gal. 

Or so I thought. Until Mother Nature moved earth under my feet and I was careened into a townhouse for a spell. Suburban-urban elan. That half-step gave me momentum. When I woke up one day in a home with cathedral ceilings and marble floors, I was as surprised as Mother.  The next (bigger, unsanctioned) step landed me in a 2300 square-foot house (fortress, really) on the ocean. The apartment gal had officially broken the mold. The problem was that I still had apartment-gal mentality. The environment was bigger but my thinking was not. 

I heard my mother shouting in my head:
Think small.
Live small.
Be tiny. 

Not surprisingly, from there it was off to an SLE, which, to the uninitiated, is a sober living environment … . 

And that's where my real journey begins.  

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