“Don’t get me wrong, this is a lot of fun. I just see it having an expiration date.”
Anyone who has lived with me knows one of my biggest downfalls as a roommate is that I don’t check expiration dates. My roommates eventually (kindly) start throwing my old stuff out themselves. I’ve never found the energy to care about the orange that’s been rotting in the corner of the fridge since we moved in. Sorry.
So when the guy I’d been casually dating for the last month let me know we apparently had an expiration date, I looked at him like he was insane. A what? I scoured my bedroom as if what I had somehow missed was hidden behind my dresser. I thought we were having fun, getting to know each other. News to me, we were already getting stale.
Escorting him out of my apartment felt a lot like what adulthood has felt like so far: a big old humbling, humiliating slap in the face.
The first year out of college isn’t exactly pretty. Rather, it’s never having clean socks even though I swear I just did laundry. It’s my boss letting me know I forwarded an email to someone who wasn’t supposed to see it. It’s nauseous Sunday mornings piecing together unknown numbers from another night at The Vig. It’s trusting the 125 bus route only for it to yet again leave me stranded at the stop for the 4th day in a row. It’s a bouncer whispering to me on my way into a concert that my fly is open. It’s actually believing things would be different with my ex only to be hurt by the exact same empty promises all over again. Wait... what?
Honestly, I feel slightly schemed out of the long-awaited romanticized adult life I worked hard to achieve. I secured a job I wanted, moved to my dream city with my best friends, and can finally independently support myself. Yet here I am, in my $9 Forever 21 crop tops and very-college, very-high-waisted jeans, scraping by in the real world as a fraudulent, make-believe adult. How do I feel more like a child at 22 than I have my entire life?
Now, this would normally be the part where I answer my own question. Typically, my posts conclude with a lesson learned or realization reached, no matter how trivial or obvious. This past year I’ve been waiting for a similar moment of enlightenment once I finally figured out how to truly “adult.”
Well, news flash: it hasn’t come. In fact, it seems pretty comical and even more naïve to think I could ever offer anyone a piece of advice ever. I can’t even zip my pants up. But I miss writing, and I never intended to answer life’s most challenging questions. While I’ll never be Buddha, somehow simply being honest has always been enough.
So here I am, writing with no purpose other than to admit that I’m lost. I have no idea what I’m doing or why I’m here. The girl I was a year ago on graduation day is a memory: confident, content, collected, and certainly not covering up dark circles under her eyes a calculated 17 minutes before spiraling off to work every morning.
Of course I miss the girl in the pictures. But I try to remind myself what it took for her to get there. It’s not like I had all my shit lined up alongside the Command hooks in my freshman year dorm. It took the entire four years of breaking apart a million different ways into a million different pieces only to put those same parts of myself back together in an entirely new form.
As I find my pieces yet again shattered in a city and life that still feel so new, I am obviously discouraged. I’m anxious, I’m confused, I’m uncomfortable, I’m impatient. I have no idea how to eat anything other than frozen food, how to fit in my signature pathetically-painful one mile runs, or how to keep up the very thing that makes me feel most like myself: writing.
I stare at the mess in front of me and wonder where my confidence is underneath the debris of another new start. I search for it in other places, other people only to return again and again to my own messy pile. I’ve been here before, and I know that only I can do the work it takes to find and love myself again.
So I will keep trying and messing up (and messing up some more) to figure out who I am and who I want to be. Chances are it might take me a little while before I pay more than $10 for a more mature going-out shirt or stop putting my faith in the 125 or, better yet, another boy who might inevitably break my heart. But regardless of my confusion and chaos, this time I'm certain I already have everything I need to be whole again. The same-old good, bad, and in between always have been and always will be my own.
Because if you ask me, some things really do never expire. ;)