The first day of my unemployment, I called my parents on the way home from the beach to tell them about my impromptu trip, to discover in shock that they were not only moving to Denver but also giving the car they had given me for graduation to my brother for no real reason.

When I protested, my dad said it quite bluntly to me over the phone: “It doesn’t matter what you want.”

(My mom, understanding this could be their last impression they leave me with, 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 from my family over marrying a man, malicious workplace outings, disappearing roommates, the 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.”

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.