One of many things I learned from being an awful, awful neighbor.
My deepest apologies to anyone who lived in Allston, Massachusetts from 1995 to 1997. Former neighbors: You should all come over and smack me in the face so we can call it even.
I spent those twenty-four months (some of my favorite months ever) in a three-story, beautiful, pee-colored, spacious, dump of a shithole house in Allston, Massachusetts. It was my junior and senior years in college (and the summers following each) and it was the first place I called “home” that wasn’t my parents’ house. To this day, I’ll sometimes open my eyes after waking up after a night’s sleep thinking I’ll be in that second floor bedroom. It was half my life ago and I still miss it.
But if there was such thing as an epicenter of all bad decisions made in the universe between August 1995 and August 1997, then 44 Linden Street in Allston, Massachusetts was definitely it. My house. My home. I lived there.
I’m not going to list all the dumb shit we did because some of those stories are best left untold. Actually, that’s not true. At all. Every single one of those stories needs to be told, and perhaps illustrated. But still, I’m not going to do it here.
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.
What I will say is that those two years taught me a lot about making a decision. Not how to make a decision, but why to make a decision. For those two years, I, along with my housemates – some of the best people anyone could ever wish to be in their life – never once made a decision driven by how “good” or “bad” the outcome might be.
Looking back, we made all our decisions based on what would make the best story. So no matter the outcome of said decision – we were sure to have at least one great story and zero regrets. For a bunch of selfish 20ish-year-olds, that seemed like a pretty sweet deal.
But here I am now, twice as old and in a different place in my life, and still when we talk about “good” decisions and “bad” decisions, what we’re describing as “good” or “bad” is actually the outcome. So, if it’s possible to separate the actual decision from the outcome, it seems that there isn’t such thing as a “good” or “bad” decision at all. There’s only a decision, and then a good or bad outcome.
The best we can do is to make a well-informed, well-thought-out decision that allows us to see what the outcomes could be. From there, we just have to be prepared to live with the outcome and know how to tell the story.
If that can be done, then you’ll never make another “bad” decision ever again. Bam. Congratulations.
All that’s left for you to do is tell your story and tell it often.
#bewhatyoumake
