“When you don’t have anything, who are you?”
“I got married pretty young. I think I was 22, right out of college. We lived in a rented house and then his grandparents offered us to buy their house and 20 acres. So at an early age we had a 2-story house and 20 acres.
But then it all burned down in August 2019 from a lightning strike, so that was pretty crazy. I lost literally everything but my dogs. I got them out, we got out, and it burned to the ground.
That was a pretty big experience and shift in realizing what you cling to as a person, and that what you find important, aren’t material things. Even after losing every material thing that you have you know that they’re just things.
After that, we started rebuilding the house, but then we ended up getting a divorce. He kept the house of course (because it was his grandparent’s land), and so after that whole process I remember just wanting to live out and be secluded.
I took my part of the divorce stuff and my savings and bought forty acres in the middle of nowhere and then built a little house on it.
I just want to be self-sufficient and raise my own gardens and you know, I don’t have kids, but if I did have kids that’s the kind of place I would want them to grow up-– wild and barefoot and have treehouses and that kind of stuff.
I don’t know if I’ve had my biggest challenge yet. I hope that I haven't had my biggest challenge yet. Everything so far has been figure-out-able. Everything so far, I’ve lived through it.
Even like losing a person out of your life through heartbreak, those things heal with time and so I don’t think I’ve gone through the hardest thing yet.
I do think heartbreak, like true genuine howl at the moon heartbreak, is incredibly hard to overcome. Not even overcome, but just grow beyond. You know it’s going to end. You only howl at the moon for a certain amount of time before that pain subsides. But like the long lasting effects of genuine heartbreak is hard. You have to decide ‘who am I going to be after these terrible things have happened to me?’
And I’m not trying to say I’m a victim of anything. Don’t be the victim. It’s pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. It’s when you are at your very lowest, there’s this opportunity to decide ‘how am I going to be better now?’ When you don’t have anything, who are you?”
-Payton A.
