I have a small blurb on my resume cover letter that has garnered some attention over the last few interviews. It explains how I spent two years living in a tiny town just outside Reno, Nevada, and how I find this experience to be as valuable to me as getting my Bachelor’s.

In a business sense, this means that I learned the true sense of self-discipline when it comes to work. It’s funny what happens when you realize you can open a browser in the middle of the workday and not have to worry about some hawkeye spying on you over cubicle walls.

It means that you’re still unshowered in pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon, you haven’t eaten anything other than a couple of Oreos and a lukewarm cup of coffee, and an assignment that should’ve taken you an hour has suddenly taken you all damn day.

No matter what anyone says, working from home is not always the corner office with an amazing view, the break room that never runs out of chocolate, and the personal assistant who does your laundry of the business world.

It takes a ton of self-discipline. I’ve been freelancing on and off for almost four years, and I still haven’t mastered it. And when you really start grappling with it in the beginning, it really sucks.

But learning about how to really be my own boss is not the only valuable thing I took away from my time in the desert.

I plan to write an entire post about what happened after we rode off into the sunset, and all I could do was look back. So, for now, I will say this: I was alone for more than 90 percent of my time in Nevada, and I was not prepared for what would happen when the only person I had to talk to was myself.

I’ve mentioned it before that it is not always fun taking a walk around inside my brain. Turns out, there are a number of derelict buildings and dark alleyways and wild-eyed muggers brandishing guns in there. But there’s another side of town where ideas are born a dozen times a day, where lines of dialogue show up and you’re not sure where they’re going yet, but you know they’re going to wind up in something. This part is the New York City of my brain–the lights are still going and the beats are still bumping at 4am, regardless of who’s annoyed by the noise.

In this part of my brain, there are tons of shop-laden streets with nothing but reflective glass, lined with mirrors, and tons of things written on the walls. And I spent lots of time in there.

Paired with the treatment I underwent while in the desert, these things I discovered and re-discovered sent me back home to New York as an entirely changed person. It was both refreshing and horribly scary, and it came with a multitude of effects. One of the biggest, and probably the most significant, is that the only person who is going to live my life is me. The only voice I will ever really have to listen to in my brain is my own. Reading those sentences aloud, they sound cliche and kind of insignificant. Of course those things are important. Everyone knows that. Everyone lives that way. But when you haven’t lived that way, at least not fully, and you actually realize it–it is HUGE.

If I’m going to put it in layman’s terms, it has provided me with the opportunity to give a lot less fcks.

Not in a callous way, not in a lazy way, in a better way. What does that mean? It means that I stopped talking to people who continuously made me anxious, even if these were people were going to be unavoidable. It meant now I don’t have to care if this will make you dislike me more.

It means that I don’t do things I don’t want to. I spend a lot of quiet time in my apartment. I love it here. It meant I’m not going to go to this dinner/bridal shower/holiday that I clearly do not want to go to, where I’m going to hate my existence for the entire 3-5 hours, just because someone “might” get mad if I don’t show up. No. No one ever gets mad at someone for declining an invite, and if they do, chances are likely they’re going to get over it before the next time I see them.

It means I’m going to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. It meant I’m tired for a bevy of reasons that I don’t have to explain or justify, and if I have to recharge for an hour or two in the middle of the day, it doesn’t mean I’m lazy. Hear that, brain?

It means I’m going to try to stop re-hashing and re-living every time I should have said this; I should have just done this; why did I let this go on? It meant those things are gone. Justified or not, you did them, and chances are likely that they’re not as momentous as they are to you. 

Which leads to one of the biggest: Letting these things fester in the back alleys of my brain only makes me anxious; it only makes me angry; it only makes me upset. Everyone else moves on, carrying their issues or not, and I’m the only one who will ever have to live in my own brain, so why make it all broken sidewalks, smashed windows, and crumbling doorways?

It takes work, every single day, to not go on autopilot into those shady neighborhoods. It takes a lot of awareness to head toward the lights and the music. Like self-discipline, it isn’t something I’ve mastered yet. I still grapple with it. And it still sucks. But it’s a lot better than it was. It’s not even comparable at this point.

When I sat down to write, I knew that I was going to reference Reno, and the first thing that popped into my head was the title to this post. The funny thing about Reno is that it’s located in a valley in the mountains, high above sea level. This means that you could wake up to a usually cloudless sky, but get to sit on your balcony and watch the biggest hailstones you’ve ever seen in your life rain down into the courtyard an hour later. It means that up in the mountains, people might be skiing when it’s 75 degrees. It means that you could wake up to snow flurries on a mid-July morning, but have to hide from the furiously hot sun by two in the afternoon. It is always changing. And it always takes getting used to.

Always.

And so, they’re fond of a familiar saying out there: Welcome to Reno. If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten minutes.