The first week of my unemployment, I called my parents on the way home from the family beach house to tell them about my impromptu trip for my first few days without a job, to discover, in shock, that they were not only moving to Denver but also giving the car they had gifted me for graduation to my brother for no real reason.

When I protested, everything my dad said boiled down to one universal point: “It doesn’t matter what you want.”

(My mom, understanding this could be their last impression they leave me with – them giving my only asset to my brother at the same moment they were abandoning me in my time of need – would later give me her car, at cost to her, as remediation.)

For six months I’ve been repeating the same list in my head of everything that happened to me over the past two years: estrangement, malicious workplace outings, failed allies, disappearing roommates, the surprise layoff.

Each recitation with the specter of that awful sentence ringing between the spaces of each bulleted trauma, loud and unconquerable to me – “It doesn’t matter what you want.”

But this week was a new list.

Not of things that happened to me, but things that I did:
– Graduated from cartography school
– Accepted a mapping job
– Earned admission to a top-tier urban planning school
– Celebrated with a family that cared

And when that sentence tried to come back to me, it could’t.
It couldn’t, because I’ve finally proved the premise false.

Maybe, at one point, it didn’t matter what I wanted.

But, hey, now it does.