“You got to stage your house if you want to sell it. ”, my real estate agent said.
Letting go of Corporate Life sometimes called for letting go of many other cushy, familiar things in life.
The friends at work that passed company open secrets to you.
The comfort (discomfort?) that emails from familiar people, some you like, some you like quite a bit less, will be waiting in your inbox when you come back from vacation.
For me, it also involved selling my house.
“The market is hot. You surely don’t want to be landlording from a monastery 600 miles away. My friends are right.
When I moved out of my Westside home after my divorce, breaking up with the house was almost as hard as the breakup itself. I avoid driving past that street. I still do.
So I always wonder what will happen when I sell my house. The house that I rebuilt my sense of self. The house that is the cacoon and holds me ever so gently during COVID.
I didn’t have time to think when the decision to sell was made. It was 3 weeks of mad cleaning, scrubbing, and throwing away furniture, so the stager can work their magic.
The stager came last Sunday. They bought their own coach, artwork, fake flowers, throw pillows, rugs, and went to work. By the end of the day, they texted pictures of my “home” with me.
Wow.
It looked gorgeous. It looked nothing like my home. I felt drawn to it too, wooing and wowing with every pictures coming in.
Is it, this fantasized version of a house where no human being can ever live in and keep up to that standard, really somewhere people want?
I guess, isn’t it how we live these days? Posting pictures of a fantasized version of our lives that can never keep up in our messy reality?
And who are we selling this fantasy to anyway? Ourselves, I supposed?
The staging was strangely therapeutic to me. This house, in my heart, is no longer mine.
Now I am just waiting for someone to come in and enjoy it, and give me the check for me to move on to the next stage of my life.
So, I am grateful, for once, that this fantasy doesn’t hook me in. It lets me go.
