Remember that apartment I told you about? My “dream home in my dream city”? “Room-with-a-view sort of place”? As I wrote in my last entry in this series, my Manhattan apartment had been my dream, but was quickly turning itself into my prison. Everything in it: the art, the designer furniture, even the air-conditioning; reminded me that I was existing on borrowed time. Better said, perhaps: a borrowed life. As much as I loved my home, surely I couldn’t love it as much as I hated a life un-lived.

So, I sold it.

It’s funny those decisions you make that you think are going to ruin you, going to irreparably change the idea of who you are. They don’t.

At the top of the housing market, I met with a real estate agent. ‘We can get a good price for this,’ he assured me, quoting numbers I knew I should accept. Instead, I didn’t. Not yet anyway. Too emotionally devoted to the life I’d spent all those years carving for myself, I hung on to the fleeting opportunity to make leaving it financially easy. Two years later, in the middle of the real estate bust, I finally sold.

Regrettable? Maybe. Or maybe not.

No longer on a banker’s salary, and without the comfort of a tidy profit on my housing investment, I was hungry. ‘Hungry’, as in, ‘devoted’. Suddenly, I had to make it, and I wasn’t going to arrive wherever I was going by coasting. This dream I believed I had, and I still wasn’t sure what it was – it would have to be real.