As I seem to constantly forget what month it is, May seems to have crept up on my like every other month of the year did before it. Apparently I am really fucking easy to creep up on. We’ll add that to the never-ending list of Things I Need To Work On. (Why haven’t I made a tag for this yet? It definitely deserves a tag.)

Anyway, May 19, 2011 was this blog’s first birthday. One year (+ 1 week, now) ago I had just returned home from college and I was terribly confused about what was supposed to happen next but I was so goddamned optimistic. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I decided I needed a blog. I called it My Cartoon Life re: an absurd conversation about my even more absurd luck / coordination deficit. Blah blah blah some bitch buys that domain name blah blah blah I’m not that original so we’ll just name it after me.

I have spent the last year feeling this horrid sense of how stagnant my life has become. Taking in the past year as one lump sum, though, a lot has changed. I mean, I wrote that post from my living room and here I am in my basement!

But seriously.

I read two things yesterday that seem incredibly appropriate and relevant to everything I’m feeling now as I think about what has happened in the past year. The first was the amazing graduation speech that Robert Krulwich gave to Berkeley Journalism School’s class of 2011. Although the speech is specifically written for journalism students and discusses the work place culture of modern media, a lot of what he has to say is more broadly applicable. The idea that our generation will never place our faith in a company that hires us, no matter how good they seem, is true of almost any industry. I’m not going to get into all the things that are amazing about this speech because I’ll bastardize it if I try. Read it if you have the time.

The particularly salient bit is this:

“I know that it is not fun, it’s the opposite of fun, to juggle rent payments with car payments, to fudge medical bills, to play roulette with your credit cards, to have bills that must be paid month after month after month, that don’t go down, and I know about friends and siblings who didn’t go crazy, who didn’t try to become professional storytellers, who became normal things, like sales people, and doctors and teachers and are now moving into homes, buying real furniture and making you feel like you are slipping backwards in the world for the sin of following a dream. I know about that.”

I had this moment of, “YES. THAT FEELING.” But then it occurred to me that the sinking, slipping feeling I have had for the last year is quite different because I haven’t been chasing anything. I could console myself if I believed that I were chasing a dream of some sort. I could bear the weight of that — perhaps not graciously — but I could bear it. I have spent far too much time this year saying that I was trying to figure out what to do, but really just crawling back under the covers to hide and hope that my life will have sorted itself out.

The other thing worth sharing is Lauren Buchsbaum’s short-but-oh-so-accurate assessment of the post-grad reality that I think a lot of us face. To make her short post even shorter: (1) Life after graduation is a lot fucking harder than we thought. (2) Our lives are what we make them. Like Lauren, I returned home to a place I didn’t particularly like the last time I lived here and, if I’m being honest with myself, made no effort to like this time around.

In my own defense, the strategy of, as Lauren so aptly puts it, “need[ing] life to get bad enough for me to actually make some changes,” ultimately worked out.

Things took a turn for the fucking crazy in the fall of my senior year and when friends of mine were making graduate school and law school (and becoming Elle Woods) plans I could not fathom the idea of more school. I also had grand plans to leave the country pretty much immediately after graduation. Things didn’t quite pan out that way.

A year later I am scrambling to get everything in order because in a few months I will be heading off to graduate school in Paris and I could not possibly be happier about that.

I’m also nearly thirty pounds lighter because I have learned to take out all of my frustration at the gym. This sounds like an irrelevant sidebar where I brag about my grand feat of vanity. It kind of is, but also has a point: when I was feeling hopeless and shitty about other things, I found something I knew how to change and started there.

And that has been my year. Have I been as good as I could have been at making changes? No. Absolutely not. I admit to this. But when I made an effort to find a way to make a change, I did. I made a change and each little victory gave me the requisite optimism to go claim another.

This is the thing that I have to keep reminding myself and maybe it’s silly, but this blog has helped me to do that. There are times when all the navel-gazing involved in this makes me uneasy so I just set it aside, but sometimes it helps to sit and really ask yourself, “All right, what the hell happened there?” 

It has also helped me meet all sorts of lovely bloggy folk who have been far too kind. (THREE LINKS KIND!) And who showed me around New York and get together to start a crazy awesome project.

And every so often when I feel the swell of change, I go chop off my hair. It’s a thing. It sends me into a frenzy of “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO I AM ANY MORE” which is somehow helpful for making me do stuff, because that bitch with the long hair? She’s fucking lazy. She’s too busy brushing her hair. BUT THIS CHICK. THIS ONE WITH THE SHORT HAIR? She’s on her shit. She’s saving money on shampoo.

(also, I am being laughed at for how much this weirds me out, but IT IS STRANGE. “Hi, I’ll pay you $50 to chop off a foot of me. Yeah, I’ve decided it’s just not important any longer. I’d do it myself, but that gets awful messy, so if you could do it neatly, that would be swell.” and more importantly, the middle school kids can’t call me Ms. Rapunzel any more and this kind of breaks my heart.)

Just pretend that made sense. And that the last couple mini-paragraphs have included actual logical transitions. Just go with it.

What I’m saying (I think) is that sometimes it feels like nothing is happening but it’s only because I’m not paying enough attention. I look at the last year and I can’t help but acknowledge how different things are, in spite of everything I felt to the contrary. And the first birthday of this blog is proof of that. It’s all there, on the interwebs. Change happened. It’s still happening. What remains to be seen is what I will do with it.

Also: unrelated: Sara sent me an email documenting her alternative use for the ab roller, as I requested in my last post, and this was the only entry. This is fine because it’s probably better that you didn’t waste your time. As promised, I am shipping her a glorious VHS copy of American Beauty. Hopefully she is cool like Dawn Schafer and has a place to watch it. She also requested that I offer up one of those stellar denim mini backpacks. I will, once I figure out a prompt.

For your amusement, her response:

“Besides the obvious idea (double ended dildo, duh), you could totally attach it to the wall with the arrow pointing down to a trash can and hang keys or dog leashes or necklaces from it. I’M A FREAKING GENIUS.”

It’s true. She is.