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Starting Over When You Don't Know What You're Starting · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: the kettle was the only thing in the house making noise it was a tuesday in october
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  SPEAKER_00: the first tuesday in a long time that did not belong
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  SPEAKER_00: to anyone no staff meeting no chart review no drive
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: i had left the clinical work behind me by my own choice which is supposed to make
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: the morning feel earned and it did for about forty minutes then
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: the kettle clicked off and i poured the water and i stood there at the counter with
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: a full cup and a full day and no idea at all what to put into either one
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: i had planned for the money i had planned for the logistics i had a folder
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  SPEAKER_00: an actual paper folder with the word next written on the tab
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  SPEAKER_00: in my own handwriting i opened it that morning it was empty i had labeled the folder
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  SPEAKER_00: before i had a single thing to put in it which tells you everything about
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: where i was so this is an episode about that morning and the ones like it
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  SPEAKER_00: about starting over when you genuinely do not know what you are starting about
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: the particular stuckness of standing at the beginning of a thing with no idea what
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  SPEAKER_00: the thing is
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  SPEAKER_00: welcome to after the rush i'm katherine mcdowell
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: this is the show for the part of life that comes after the big push after the career
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: and the raising and the building when the calendar clears and
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: the question goes quiet and large if you are new here you can start with this one
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: the episodes are built to stand on their own you will not be lost
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: here's
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  SPEAKER_00: the thing I believe that morning and I think a great many capable people believe it
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: i believed that before i could begin i had to know what i was beginning
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: that somewhere out ahead of me was a destination a clear and nameable thing
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  SPEAKER_00: and my job was to identify it first and then walk toward it find the vision then act
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: on the vision in that order it is a reasonable belief
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: it is how we are taught to do almost everything that matters you decide on
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  SPEAKER_00: the degree then you take the courses you choose the house then you sign
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: the papers goal first step second we get very good at it by
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  SPEAKER_00: the time we reach this chapter we have been doing it for forty years and
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: then we arrive at the one threshold where it does not work
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: and we treat our own confusion as a personal failing
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: i sat with that empty folder and i decided there was something wrong
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: with me everyone else seemed to have an answer to the question the woman
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: from my old building who left to open a pottery studio the man who finally wrote
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  SPEAKER_00: the book they knew i did not know and i took the not knowing as evidence
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  SPEAKER_00: that i had skipped a step that the vision was supposed to have arrived by now
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  SPEAKER_00: and mine was running late
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  SPEAKER_00: it was not late i was asking the wrong question start with
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: the phrase itself starting over we say it so easily i said it to myself that morning
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: at the counter i am starting over but look at what the phrase smuggles in over from
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  SPEAKER_00: the top as though the page were blank
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  SPEAKER_00: as though the woman standing in her kitchen with
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  SPEAKER_00: the cooling coffee had arrived there with nothing the way you arrive at
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: a first day knowing no one and carrying no tools that woman had put herself
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: through college as a single mother she had run departments and supervised people
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  SPEAKER_00: and written grant proposals that brought real money into an organization
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  SPEAKER_00: that had none
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  SPEAKER_00: she had sat across from women with no credit history and helped them understand
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  SPEAKER_00: that they were not their debt she knew how institutions move and
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  SPEAKER_00: where they are soft she knew how to read a budget and how to read a room none of
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  SPEAKER_00: that walked out of the building when she did you do not get to set it down it comes
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  SPEAKER_00: with you whether you want it to or not the whole accumulated weight
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  SPEAKER_00: of every life you have already lived
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  SPEAKER_00: so the page is not blank the page is the most written on thing you own
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  SPEAKER_00: the trouble is not that you are starting from nothing the trouble is
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  SPEAKER_00: that you are standing on top of so much you cannot see the shape of it
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: and you mistake that for emptiness there is a real difference between an empty room
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  SPEAKER_00: and a full one you have not finished sorting they can feel identical
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  SPEAKER_00: the first moment you walk in
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  SPEAKER_00: they are not the same problem and they do not have
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  SPEAKER_00: the same answer let me tell you how I actually began the thing that became
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: the next decade of my life because it was nothing like a plan years before
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  SPEAKER_00: that kitchen morning I was running
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  SPEAKER_00: a small nonprofit I had helped start we were doing good work and we were out
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  SPEAKER_00: of money which is the standard condition of good work someone had to find funding
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  SPEAKER_00: i had never written a grant in my life i did not carry a vision of myself as
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  SPEAKER_00: a grant writer i had a budget shortfall and a deadline and i was the one in the room
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: so i learned how to write one not because i had decided who i was going to become
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  SPEAKER_00: because the next true thing in front of me was a funding application and i knew how
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  SPEAKER_00: to find out how to do hard things i wrote the first one badly i wrote
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  SPEAKER_00: the second one less badly
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  SPEAKER_00: somewhere around the time the check started arriving i looked up and saw that i had
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  SPEAKER_00: a skill i had never set out to acquire and an identity i had never chosen
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  SPEAKER_00: on purpose i had become a grant writer by writing grants the title came last
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  SPEAKER_00: the work came first this is the part i want to slow down on because it is
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: the whole episode i did not begin by knowing what i was beginning
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  SPEAKER_00: if you had asked me that first afternoon with the application open in front
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  SPEAKER_00: of me what i was building i would have told you i was just trying
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  SPEAKER_00: to make payroll i would have been right
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  SPEAKER_00: the building only became visible later looking back once there was enough of it
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  SPEAKER_00: to see we tell the story the other way around afterward we say and then i became
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  SPEAKER_00: a grant writer as though there had been a decision
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  SPEAKER_00: a moment of clarity a vision there was no vision there was a tuesday and a deadline
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  SPEAKER_00: and the next true thing the clarity is what we add in the retelling because
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  SPEAKER_00: the retelling needs a shape and the living of it did not have one yet
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  SPEAKER_00: i want
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  SPEAKER_00: to add one thing to this because it is easy to hear everything i just said as
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  SPEAKER_00: a story about ambition and it is not
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  SPEAKER_00: or not only for part of my working life I helped corporations design programs
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  SPEAKER_00: for their employees who were retiring I sat with people in the last months before
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  SPEAKER_00: the calendar cleared and then sometimes I saw them again a year or two
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  SPEAKER_00: on what follows is what I lived and watched not a prescription
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  SPEAKER_00: and it is no substitute for your own clinician who knows your particular body in
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  SPEAKER_00: a way I never will
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  SPEAKER_00: but the pattern I saw was not subtle the people who walked out of a career
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  SPEAKER_00: into nothing did not fare as well as the people who walked out of one thing and
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  SPEAKER_00: into another even when the other thing was small a class a board seat a few hours
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  SPEAKER_00: of work that mattered to someone I am not handing you a study with a clean number
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  SPEAKER_00: on it and I would be careful with anyone who does
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  SPEAKER_00: because human lives resist clean numbers
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: i am telling you what i watched happen to real people whose names i knew
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: the body keeps a kind of account of whether the days have a shape i spent decades at
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: the place where stress sits in the body and money sits in the identity and
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  SPEAKER_00: the structure of a week sits in the health and i can tell you those things are not
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: in separate rooms they never were when the days lose their shape entirely
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: the loss does not stay politely on the calendar
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  SPEAKER_00: it moves into the body and it moves in quietly so the next true thing is not only
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: about momentum or meaning though it is about those it is also in a plain
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  SPEAKER_00: and unglamorous way about staying well a shape to the weak is not
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  SPEAKER_00: a reward you collect after you have figured out the grand plan it is closer to
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  SPEAKER_00: a need and the steadying part the part i find genuinely reassuring
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  SPEAKER_00: is that it asks for no grand plan at all it asks only for
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  SPEAKER_00: the next true thing done small done now
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: here's where I am supposed to tell you
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: that this is your moment to reinvent yourself that word is everywhere in this part
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: of life a whole economy has been built on the backs of people standing
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  SPEAKER_00: in their kitchens with cooling coffee
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  SPEAKER_00: and the pitch never changes you are not enough yet here is who
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  SPEAKER_00: to become instead i want to be careful with that word
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: because i think it does real harm and it does it gently which is
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  SPEAKER_00: the worst way reinvention assumes the old version was a draft a first attempt
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  SPEAKER_00: to be corrected
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  SPEAKER_00: it tells a sixty-year-old woman who put herself through college
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  SPEAKER_00: and raised her children and built a career that her next move is to tear all of
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  SPEAKER_00: that down and become someone new as though the someone she already is were
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  SPEAKER_00: the problem she is not the problem she is the material what i was doing
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  SPEAKER_00: that morning what i had done years earlier with
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  SPEAKER_00: the grant application was not reinvention it was design
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  SPEAKER_00: and the difference is not a word game reinvention begins by deciding
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  SPEAKER_00: the old thing was wrong design begins by taking honest inventory
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  SPEAKER_00: of what is already there what is load-bearing and what is not what you want to keep
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  SPEAKER_00: and what you have outgrown and then building the next thing out of
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  SPEAKER_00: that material you do not knock down a house with a good foundation you look at
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  SPEAKER_00: the foundation and you ask what it can hold
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  SPEAKER_00: when you stop asking what am i going to become
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  SPEAKER_00: and start asking what do i already have that i want to build with
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  SPEAKER_00: the paralysis loosens not because you suddenly know
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  SPEAKER_00: the destination you still do not know the destination you no longer need
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  SPEAKER_00: to you only need the next true thing the one that is honest to what you already are
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  SPEAKER_00: and the willingness to do a small version of it before you can see where it leads
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  SPEAKER_00: that is the quiet correction underneath all of this you do not design
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  SPEAKER_00: the next chapter by knowing how it ends you design it the way i wrote
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  SPEAKER_00: that first grant one true move at a time made out of what is already in your hands
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  SPEAKER_00: the shape arriving late and the title arriving last
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  SPEAKER_00: so i will not send you off
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  SPEAKER_00: to write a five-year plan you do not need a vision this week
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  SPEAKER_00: the vision is not the first thing it might not even be the third thing here's
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  SPEAKER_00: the smaller thing the doable one sometime in the next few days when
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  SPEAKER_00: the house is quiet do not ask yourself what you are going to become ask
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  SPEAKER_00: the other question what do I already know how to do that I have not done in a while
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  SPEAKER_00: or have never once done for myself instead of
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  SPEAKER_00: for everyone else write down one just one
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  SPEAKER_00: then do a small version of it before the week is out not the whole thing
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  SPEAKER_00: a first badly done real version of it the grant nobody would have funded
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  SPEAKER_00: the first one I still have that folder the one labeled next
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  SPEAKER_00: in my own handwriting it is not empty anymore but I did not fill it by sitting
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  SPEAKER_00: and thinking until the answer came I filled it
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  SPEAKER_00: the way you fill anything one true thing at a time
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  SPEAKER_00: mostly looking down at the work and only now and then looking up to see how far
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  SPEAKER_00: the path had gone the coffee that morning went cold before i drank it
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  SPEAKER_00: so i made another cup then i went and found the next true thing which turned out
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  SPEAKER_00: to be a phone call i had been avoiding for a month it was not a destiny it was
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  SPEAKER_00: a phone call that is how it starts that is the only way it ever starts
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  SPEAKER_00: i'm Katherine McDowell i will see you after the rush that's the episode
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: if it gave you something the kindest thing you can do is send it to one person
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: who is standing
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  SPEAKER_00: in their own quiet kitchen right now not sure what they are starting you can
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: subscribe wherever you are listening so the next one finds you
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: on its own there is related writing on all of this over at the newsletter
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: and a few things i have made to help with the inventory part over at aftertherush.store