4 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
I was thirty years old when my girlfriend left me.
At the time, it felt like the end of the world. I had enough money saved to make the move, but emotionally I was a wreck. I needed distance. I needed a reset. So I packed up and drove to San Diego, where my cousin lived.
I picked up work with a stucco crew while I figured out what came next. One afternoon I went by the property to pick up a paycheck. My employer had been working nights and weekends building an addition onto his detached garage, and he wanted to show me what he was working on.
I saw it before I saw anything else. A makeshift structure behind the house. Plywood walls. A tin roof. A plastic curtain. A red clay dirt floor. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than two feet by two feet, pressed directly against the hot water heater with only inches between them. That was the shower.
When I turned the corner of the garage, I saw the port-o-potty in the side yard. My thoughts started to swirl. What am I about to walk into? As I stepped through the threshold, I froze with disbelief as the complete picture snapped into focus.
I was looking at a detached two-car garage that split its space between excess storage and crude living quarters. One half was filled with leftover storage from the owner’s main house. Boxes stacked five and six feet high across the entire space. Not a car. Not a workshop. Just a wall of accumulated excess. Overflow. You could see it from everywhere in the garage because there was nowhere else to look.
The other half, raw living quarters. A concrete floor. No insulation. A partial wall that covered only half of its neighbor’s excess storage. A bed. A makeshift kitchen. No table. No couch. No TV. The new construction was a room along the back wall of the garage. A 5’ by 10’ room that would somehow have to fit a toilet, a shower, and a washer and dryer. That was the whole space.
Inside it lived a family of four.
The irony: the man who lived here with his family spent his days working on a million-dollar renovation and came home to this every night.
That moment in time stirred something in me and changed the way I perceive life.
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Distance lets you feel sympathy from a safe place. Proximity removes the safe place.
Before that moment, I thought I understood hardship. I didn’t. What I understood was discomfort. There’s a big difference.
I remember the drive home more than anything else. You see, before this moment I had been complaining about not being able to do all the things I wanted, thinking how bad I had it. Sitting behind the wheel as I drove, I was stewing over my most recent thoughts. I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and yelled out loud, angrily.
How dare you? How dare you complain about not being able to go to a baseball game or out to dinner, or about missing all the extra frills in life?
Not because my problems weren’t real. They were. I was still rebuilding. But suddenly the things I had been mourning started feeling very small compared to the things I had. A roof over my head. An inside shower. A TV. Food in the cupboards. My health. Air filling my lungs. People who loved me. A smile that still showed up in spite of everything.
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That moment immediately shifted the reality I live in. Not a turn toward minimalistic, not guilt for what I have, but clarity. I still want things. I still buy things. But long gone are the days I confuse a want going unmet with real hardship. I can often be heard saying: First world problems, after I hear myself or someone complaining about something trivial.
When someone is sitting in their own version of what I was sitting in, mourning what they can’t have, treating discomfort like hardship, I tell them about the outdoor shower.
Do you actually know the difference, or have you just never stood close enough to the question?