And yet, it has been a painful experience. Packing up my office was a lot like those scenes you see in movies, where someone packs up the house they've always lived in, and every item they touch holds its own memory. Except in those scenes, its almost always fond memories that are evoked. In my real-life move out, the memories were almost all bad, about promise unfulfilled.
First, I was forced to face what a pack rat I've been. All that paper! most of which I didn't need and went straight into the recycling bin, where it should have gone months or years ago.
Them there was the substance of so many of those papers. Lost opportunities. Poor follow-up. And in way, way too many cases, time wasted.
There were the memories of how excited I was to move into the office, certain of how impressed potential clients would be, and that I'd be making money within a year, two at most. That unfulfilled expectation is really putting a damper on my hopes for the new place, though I know I have to learn from my past experience.
Anyway, those bad memories kept hitting me as I packed up the office, and it was really tough because my wife was helping me pack and our young daughter was there most of the day, too. So it made me even more conscious than I usually am that those failures meant that I had failed my family. Had I not been so busy with so much packing and moving to do, I don't know how long I would have dwelt on those thoughts. As it was, thank God, I was so busy that I couldn't dwell on them. Still, they were enough to stress me out, to make me short with my wife even as she was helping me.
Now that I think about it, this is a purely cathartic post. Not much you can learn from it. And I don't mean to scare anyone out of going solo. But it this post instills a little fear in you, that's not a bad thing.
