The level was still sitting on my kitchen counter two weeks after I hung the picture with it — the borrowed one, the one I’d had to look up instructions for like it was a foreign appliance.
I wasn’t planning to buy anything. I was at the hardware store to return a drill bit that didn’t fit, a five-minute errand wedged between the dry cleaner and the grocery store.
Then I found myself in the tool aisle anyway, reading the backs of tape measures like they might tell me something.
For six years, tools lived in one specific drawer of one specific garage that wasn’t mine to organize. Anything bigger than a picture hook went through him first — not because I ever asked him to handle it, exactly, but because somewhere along the way “who’s better at this” quietly turned into “who’s allowed to do this,” and I stopped noticing the difference.
The drill I used for the picture came from that era. I’d kept it in a kitchen drawer for two years, no case, no real ownership of it, just a stray relic of a marriage I hadn’t finished sorting through the closets of yet.
I stood in that aisle and did the math out loud, a habit I’m not proud of and haven’t quite broken. A decent cordless drill. A level that isn’t borrowed from a memory. A tape measure. A small case to keep it all in. Maybe ninety dollars, on a Tuesday, for a version of independence I could have just, at some point, decided I already had.
I want to be honest about the money part, because it would be a little dishonest not to. Ninety dollars is not a sacrifice for me, and I’m not going to perform hesitation about the price tag that I didn’t actually feel. The block here was never really the ninety dollars.
It was permission.
I put the case in my cart the way you sneak something past a version of yourself who still thinks needing your own tools is somehow presumptuous — like assuming you might have to fix something on your own meant assuming something else about your life I wasn’t ready to assume yet.
The woman at the register asked if I was building something. I told her I was just tired of borrowing things. She laughed like she understood exactly what I meant, and maybe she did.
The case sits on the top shelf of my hall closet now, yellow and a little too new-looking next to the older things around it. I haven’t used it yet.
That’s not really the point.
The point is that if something in this apartment breaks on a Wednesday when nobody’s around, I already own what I’d need to look at it before deciding whether I actually need to call someone. That’s a small, unglamorous kind of readiness. It doesn’t look like a breakthrough from the outside — just a bag of tools on a shelf, ninety dollars on a receipt I didn’t keep.
But it’s mine, bought without a single text asking whether I actually needed it, or what kind, or whether I could manage.
If there’s a version of independence you’ve technically had for a while but never quite let yourself own — a skill, a tool, a decision you keep routing through someone else out of habit rather than need — I’d ask what it would actually cost you to just go stand in that aisle and buy it for yourself.
Sometimes it’s ninety dollars. Sometimes it’s just deciding you don’t need permission you were never actually denied.
I write the smaller, unfinished version of things like this in my newsletter, usually before I’ve figured out what they’re actually about.
With Love, Wren
Leave a Reply