I’m in a hotel room in Little Rock. Doctor’s appointment early tomorrow — it’s an hour and a half from home, so we drove in the night before. My wife’s working. I’ve been going through my notebook.
One of the things I wrote was about weird stuff I do to make younger me happy. Not in a deep, reflective way. Just — sometimes I make a decision that makes no practical sense, and the only real explanation is that some part of me needed it.
I bought a Chevy Silverado Trail Boss a few years ago. Lifted. Leather seats. Sunroof. The whole thing. I drive maybe 5,000 miles a year. I don’t haul anything. I don’t need a truck. I bought it because somewhere around age 12 or 13, I saw a nice truck and said something like "I’d love to drive something like that one day," and someone told me that with the way I was, that was never going to happen.
I don’t know exactly what they meant. But it stuck.
So I bought the truck. And it made 12-year-old me very happy.
Then a few years later I traded it for an electric car, because that actually made sense for my life. And that made me happy too — in a completely different way. Like, the thing I needed to prove was already proven. Time to make a sound financial decision.
Both moves were right. For different reasons. At different times.
I don’t have a bigger point here. It’s just something I noticed — that sometimes I do things because some version of me from a long time ago needed the win. And now I’m old enough that just knowing I could do something, and choosing not to, is kind of interesting on its own.