I thought, walking, about what I wanted from the next year. Not in an abstract self-improvement way. In the practical way of someone who has cleared some space and is looking at what to do with it.
The career move, if it happened, would be significant. More scope, more responsibility, more pay, which matters less for itself than for what it adds to the savings rate. I’ve been adding to my savings at a pace that feels like building toward something, but the something has been vague. I want to own property. I want a place that is mine in a way an apartment isn’t, where the decisions about the overhead light and the leaky faucet are mine to make and mine to cost. That requires a down payment that I don’t yet have and a salary that makes the mortgage manageable.
I’m not in a hurry for that either. I’m thirty-two. I have time.
What I don’t have — what I’ve given up having for fourteen years, in one form or another — is the luxury of not counting. The thing where you don’t think about money because you don’t have to. I probably won’t have that, in the way some people have it, from having had a foundation in early adulthood that made the math less precarious.
But I have the next version of it, which is the version where you’ve done the math and the math works and you understand every number and nothing is a surprise. That’s what I have. That’s mine.