It’s been an eventful week. On Tuesday I received an email, which felt to me like an earthquake:

Hi Kate,

I am sending you this email to let you know that (my husband) and I have given this considerable thought.

We will be listing (your house) for sale. I’ll be giving (the realtor) your contact information. (The realtor) will contact you and give you Notice, when she needs to walk through your home to do an Evaluation and also for future showing.

I would like you to know that you are our Tenants as long as we own the property. When there is a new owner, according to the Residential Tenancy Rules of BC, they must give you a minimum of Two Month Notice to Vacate if they want you to vacate or
the new Owners may want to keep you as Tenants. The decision is theirs to make.

If you have any questions please email me,

Sincerely,
(Landlady)

Sweetie and I are in for a big change, but we’re not sure what that’s going to look like yet. We have *loved* living in our house these past few years, and our landlords are straight up the best landlords I have ever rented from, in 20 years of renting. I have no resentment towards them for placing the house for sale – they have been so good to us! This event was not unexpected, we figured it would happen eventually, which is why for the past few years we’ve been doing everything we can to save money so that we can buy our own house.

In fact we attempted to buy a little place earlier this year and we were unsuccessful, so we resolved to stay put for another year or so before trying again.

Well, now we’re probably going to get evicted by new property owners. It likely won’t happen for at least 3 months (the house has to sell, and then they must give us notice) but three months isn’t a lot of time, really.

The realtor last night said she has sold this place 3 times in the past 20 years, and it’s always been an investment / rental property, and that no one has had to move before… but honestly I think she was just saying that so we wouldn’t be grumpy to prospective buyers. (We wouldn’t do anything to impede the sale anyway.) The real estate market has spiked in our area, and our landlords have every right to cash in… but there is no way the new investors are going to want to keep us on, paying the rent we’re paying, when they could evict us, renovate the unit, and rent it for double what we pay. Yes, that’s legal, and known as a “reno-viction”.

It’s not a surprise that this is happening, we were just hoping we’d have some more time before it did.

The last time we moved, in 2015, life felt pretty chaotic. We almost left our beloved West Coast. Rental housing is extremely difficult to come by, and what is available is ridiculously costly. We lucked into our current housing because my friend bought her first house, and we slid into her rental at her rate, because the landlords liked us and didn’t want to bother listing it. It’s why we bought our car, which was a whole other ordeal we could barely afford at the time, but it was the only way we’d have a shot at renting our current place. It’s been my favourite place to live. I *love* this house.

And I love living here, on the West Coast. We are so blessed, so fortunate. We could not have done this without my psychic business, either. My friends, you are all a part of this.

We do want to stay here. If we can’t find a way to buy a place, or a rental we can afford, our “worst” case scenario is to leave the area and start again somewhere new. People have to do this in life, sometimes, and where we end up if that happens will depend upon what hospital job I can find. That’s another potential loss as I *love* my hospital job.

But we’re not at the job searching phase yet. We’re in the investigating and listing possibilities phase.

(photo credit)

As I was driving through the provincial park this morning – the world’s best commute, by the way – I was thinking about how this earthquake of an event has cracked open our insulated little life here, and is showing us many different possibilities. Because a change in the near future is *necessary*, it has shifted our frame of minds to see every possibility, and assess them pragmatically, even though there are powerful emotions surrounding *all* of them.

I’m a grounded, and sensitive person. I would really have preferred this change to happen on our terms, when we’re ready, when we are moving *on purpose*. But that’s not how life always works. I have never once been able to accurately predict what my own life would look like 5 years down the line! I like to be flexible and embrace life’s possibilities, even while I grieve the potential change.

Ugh my friends, I don’t want to leave!

I have really appreciated all I’ve invested in therapy in the past 3 years. I haven’t written a lot about it, but it’s been a big part of my life. When my mother got sick, and my life became all about making as much money as I could so I could visit her a few more times before she died, the anxiety (on the heels of losing our coffee business, by the way) pushed me to a limit in my brain. For the first time in my life, I found myself struggling to cope with anxiety and normal life challenges, and all I could do was shut down. It was scary for me, and even after our life stabilized, my mother passed, and we were safely moved into our wonderful house, I found myself struggling to manage my anxiety, and I wrote about it a few times. I also developed an eating disorder, which I’ve written somewhat about, and I developed symptoms of PTSD which I got some effective therapeutic help with. Oh yeah, and I dealt with chronic pelvic pain, and had a major surgery. I’ve been busy, sorting out my brain and my body!

It’s all been positive. It’s been worth it too, because I know if this notice of high potential for eviction had come through even a year ago, I don’t know if I would have coped without panicking.

I’m not panicking. And I’m marvelling that my nervous system is handling this uncertainty so well! Somewhere along my self-healing journey, the part of my brain that felt broken by the overwhelming challenges of 2012 – 2015 has healed, and I’m back to the me I remember from my 20s, where I wasn’t afraid of change, or a challenge. Hello there, old Kate! I so appreciate this realization.

I mean, this could potentially result in uprooting our *entire lives* – which we sacrificed so much to create – and start all over again in another community leaving behind our jobs, our friends and support systems, and our beloved wild west coast. This would have turned me inside out if this had happened any sooner.

But here we are, and I can honestly say that nothing bad is happening here. We are healthy, thank god! There is a lot of good in our lives, and maybe, just maybe, we are being pushed because we need it.

Maybe we will be able to buy something, and then we’ll *really* be living our west coast dream. Or maybe we’ll find another “miracle” rental that will buy us another year or two. Or maybe we’ll move somewhere else and start over, and if so, there will be good things about wherever we end up.

There’s a lot of Buddhist practice I notice coming up right now. We are going to be proactive and prioritize what we *want* to happen, and make sure we do everything we can to make that happen, but the outcome isn’t guaranteed, and we can’t become overly attached to our most-wanted outcomes. Attachment to outcomes can really be a motivator for action, like it was for our coffee business, like it was for our cross-country move to BC, but what really counts is the action we take, and my own ability to regulate my energy, my attachments. It’s so helpful.

So stay tuned, folks! 2019 is going to be a big transitional year for us! Send us good vibes!

And hey, I just launched a special discount for Blog Friends, my “Friendship Circle” mailing list. Sign up here and you’ll get $25 off your next session with me. It’s my thank you to you for caring enough about my story, and my writing, to subscribe. Make sure you’re on the list!