In my last post I mentioned this post, which I wrote first. Now that I feel like I’ve prefaced it with some vague disclaimers, I feel a lot more comfortable posting it. It is all sorts of redundant after the last post, but this is useful for me in the weird sort of personal archiving way that this blog functions for me. Clearly, this is a thing I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. If you read the previous (shorter) post, you should just skip this.
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I had the good fortune to spend Valentine’s Day with a group of awesomely hilarious ladies, sushi, wine, and an awesomely mostly not scary movie. That actually has next to nothing to do with this post. It serves only as an introduction to the fact that the stragglers of this group ended the night with a big taking-stock-of-our-lives chat.
Right now: broke, in debt, underemployed (a fascinating term I never use, but it’s convenient), still partially reliant on our parents, single. We’ve covered my thoughts on caring about that last item, namely that I have neither thoughts nor caring, but it was part of the list, so let’s go with it. The list has more impact if it’s longer, you see.
Five years ago, that list described me as accurately as it does now, and while I don’t think I was too anxious about it (or maybe I was; certainly I was more anxious about my love life then) the thought that I would still be all of those things in five years would have horrified me. Five years ago I was just starting my semester abroad in Ghana. Let’s go back five years and a couple months: it wouldn’t be hard to give that girl an honest picture of my life now that would make her weep.
Five years ago, I was 19 and a sophomore in college. I had major issues with germs and bugs. I never reused towels (that is, I had to have a clean, washed, unused towel after every shower). I had just realized that although I went to DC to major in political science, I was absolutely over it. Sociology was an enjoyable but path-of-least-resistance decision. I had just done Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, mostly because the idea of being in my underwear in front of an audience sounded horrifying. I discovered how much I enjoy doing things that terrify me.
Ten years ago. Ten years ago I was 14. I had just dyed my hair purple. I was learning to be a person who keeps up with current events and forms political opinions all by her little old self. We had just moved to Missouri, which was the core of my teenage angst, though I’m sure I would have felt out of place and frustrated with the world regardless. Moving felt like the surest example of how little agency I had in my own life, though I wouldn’t have known to put it in those words then. It’s so clear to me now, though, how much that feeling drove all of the other awful feelings from that time. I control nothing. My life is steered by forces outside myself and my task is only to endure it.
At this same time, I started a music website that would do lots of great things for me that I would fail to understand for many years. In spite of all the angst, I did have a lot of big, crazy dreams. They changed often. I was going to be a musician. I was going to be a journalist. I was going to be an actress.
In truth: I am more optimistic now. We tend to associate big dreams with kids who want to be astronauts; surely no adult who has seen anything of reality could match that optimism. My big dreams have changed a little bit in terms of their endgame, but the largest change has been my sense of a path to get there. Ten years ago, I could dream big things, but it amounted to little more than daydreaming. I had no idea how to get from A (my present) to B (my magical imagined future).
What I know now that I did not know then, ten years ago or even five, is how much I could handle. The reason I would never trade places with any past version of myself, the reason I have no desire to go backwards, is that I am very aware of how much stronger and how much more capable I become year after year.
I don’t know when this happened, really. I don’t know how I got to this point. I feel as though I woke up one (recent) morning and realized that I still had some of the problems that had once left me cripplingly depressed, but they stopped scaring me. I never went to camp as a kid, probably because I cried about leaving my parents when I went to stay with my grandparents for a week. I still cry each time I say goodbye to my parents because I’m ridiculous, but it’s obviously different now. A few nights sleeping without nightlights and the dark became manageable (but let’s be real: I still hate the dark.) I remember my insane terror of riding my first roller coaster with a loop which was followed by it immediately becoming my favorite ride at Six Flags (until I became tall enough for rides with ALL. THE. LOOPS.)
This has been the fate of my big scary adult fears, like my seemingly insurmountable debt burden, figuring out what I’m supposed to do with my life, the inevitability of dying alone, or, you know, the number of new reality shows that have seemed like harbingers of the apocalypse. Face fear, defeat fear.
The best part, though, is that it has a sort of snowballing effect. It’s not just, “Well, I’ve been out of college for a few years now, and I’ve managed to navigate paying bills sometimes, finding a few jobs, and occasionally finding places to sleep that aren’t paid for by my parents, so I guess I can continue to pay bills sometimes, maintain employment, and occasionally find places to sleep that aren’t paid for by my parents.” Well, it is that. It’s also this bigger sense that if I can handle all that shit — things that I once doubted were possible — then I can probably handle the rest of the scary stuff I haven’t faced. I’ve yet to encounter a problem I couldn’t solve. Sometimes I have had to ask for help, and I am lucky to have so many people to ask for help when I need to.
This all sounds so silly now that I write it out. I am stating the obvious. But whether this would have been intellectually obvious to me five years ago or ten years ago, I am certain that it’s not a truth I had internalized then. I know this because that is a thing that is happening now. Listening to anxieties about the present and the future was striking because I just thought, “This used to seem so much scarier. When did this all start to feel so manageable?”
Our hostess/Valentine added to this when she asked, “Ten years ago, did you ever think you’d live in Ghana and Paris?” No. I wouldn’t even have guessed I’d live in D.C., let alone live abroad. Maybe I would have guessed that I’d be back in LA by now, but I had no concept of how I’d get here. I still don’t know what comes next. I now know how to get to different places, but I’m still making choices and I know enough to know that all kinds of unexpected things will keep happening. Some of those things will suck and some will be amazing but each new time I am hit with something that leaves me sobbing in the fetal position thinking, “I can’t do this. I can’t handle this,” I get to remember that I’ve been there before, and whatever it was, I worked it out and kept on going.
Adulthood has a few things that I’d gladly give up, but I would never go backwards, because that knowledge is infinitely more valuable to me than anything I could gain from it.