Until recently, I lived in a one-hundred-and-five-year-old house my dad inherited from his father’s youngest sister. The house was built by my great-grandfather, on land near where the family had resided for several generations. Dad talked about selling it off and on the entire time I lived there, and I knew he would try to sell it when President Biden started pushing to raise capital gains taxes.

Still, when Dad told me he’d signed a contract with a real estate agent, it knocked me for a loop. He gave me three weeks to move only because I insisted we needed time to clean the house out.

I was wrong about that. Three weeks later, the house is only half empty. We’re making progress, though, which is all we can do with the time we have.

For a week or so after Dad listed the house, I was completely devastated. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to put my books. I’d be happy living out of my car; unfortunately, it’s not big enough to house my library.

So for that first week, I juggled feelings of failure and guilt (because I hadn’t been able to hold onto the house) with the knowledge that I was going to be homeless in a few weeks, all while struggling to maintain a business that had slowly been declining. All my plans to expand and shore it up, all my hopes and dreams, went down the drain in one, brief conversation.

The shock of Dad’s announcement was so huge, it made me forget an important truth: I knew I didn’t belong in that house.

Yes, I wanted it. I’m a historian at heart. The idea of living in a generational family home held a lot of appeal. Add to that the fact that my great-aunt loved my father and his brother enough to entrust the house to them, and they, in turn, entrusted it to me. I constantly faced internal pressure to live up to that expectation.

Which is precisely where all those feelings of guilt and failure came from.

Because of those circumstances, I set aside my own gut instinct that I belonged elsewhere and tried to hold onto the house anyway. Even though I knew I was hurting myself by staying there. I love that house, I really do, but the area is isolated and far away from the things I love, the things that feed my creativity.

And it was never fully under my control. Autonomy is incredibly important to me, and has been for most of my life. It was really stressful knowing that unless I bought the house, I would always be under Dad’s thumb in managing it.

Especially since I truly wanted to be elsewhere. No, not just wanted. The feeling that I needed to be somewhere else haunted me the entire time I lived at Aunt Dixie’s.

So after a week of wallowing, my brain finally woke up and reminded me of something important: Now that I’m free of caring for the house on the hill, I can find where I truly belong.

Dad selling the house isn’t the end of the world. Rather, it’s a chance to discover something better. It was opportunity knocking, and while it took me a week to recognize that, now that I have, I can finally move forward, toward fulfilling a better, more fitting dream. It’s such a relief to be able to focus on my own goals without having to worry about ensuring someone else’s.