where do we go from here?

But I needed to witness someone wrestle
With what it means to just exist
-Dawes

Existing is hard. A pair of lungs, working legs, synapses that fire and illuminate, you’d think the biology of it all would be the difficult part of it. But often it’s not.

I’ve had a lot of what happens next conversations with people lately. It’s partly the field I’m in—seasonal work is transient, and movement in every sense is always on people’s mind—but it’s partly age, as well. Twenties are a messy decade. Life plans and road maps only get you so far.

The moment I realized that my plans were broken and that my map had gotten me lost was in New York City. I’d expected to love New York. I was a new college graduate, and I’d romanticized the city as a place where I’d be young and poor, struggling but successful. My life was supposed to be an episode of Girls, only with moderately better choices and a less irritating protagonist. I’d spend entire afternoons combing through the grid of Manhattan by foot, hoping that by walking I’d find a way to make the city home or a way to escape, but my sojourns never brought me either.

Ever since New York, I feel like I’ve been living year-to-year, never making decisions with an endgame in mind, but just living to live, gaining experiences and figuring it out, knowing that I have the tools and resources to make something of this all when the time feels right.

(When does the time feel right? Maybe you just know. Or maybe you don’t know and you just do it anyway.)

We don’t prepare people well for the world beyond college. We tell them to get a job, to work and save, but if that doesn’t happen, we tend to shrug our shoulders and wish them luck. Life feels very narrow sometimes.

What I struggle with the most is the shadowy judgment I feel from others watching me navigate my own life. It’s nothing outright. It’s hidden in the subtleties, the nuances that inform me that they think I’ve strayed too far, that I am too old for such instability. It bothers me when people no longer see me as the smart and motivated woman I was in college, that, for some reason, I can’t be smart and successful and wandering all at once.

Formal education isn’t the only form of growth that matters. Academia is only as high as the pedestal you put it on.

I’m not really sure who reads these posts (besides my few vocal, dedicated readers; I see you), but maybe you need to hear this because sometimes I do: You will find your way. You will find your way because you are capable of choice, and life takes the shape of your choices. It’s going to be alright. You will make it work. The days of thorns and bramble will become memories, and one day you will miss this struggle. Appreciate the bruises and flowing blood while you can. You will find your way, and it will be as golden as you always dreamed it would be. There’s courage in the choices you’re making, in choosing differently, in seeing differently, and I hope you know I’m proud of you. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

My senior yearbook quote for high school was from Atlas Shrugged, which, despite my conflicting views on the novel, I still find motivating:

Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do no let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

You’ve got this, dear reader. The world is yours ❤