Growing up, you look at your parents and they're ADULT. They're GROWNUP. But how did they get that way? My mom would tell me she had he first beer at 16 and she went to frat parties in college, but here she is, getting up at 6 am to enjoy her coffee and eat breakfast, day after day after day, sending us off to school and wearing heels. And my father, he WAS a frat boy, for a time. But when I was little, he wore suits and had a beer belly and meetings... how did they get to where they were?
I think as a kid, and a teenager, you have this perception that adults have everything figured out because they take care of you and they know things you don't. But the truth is, they're often making it up as they go along. I would freak out at the idea of having a child when I was younger--18, 19-- knowing I didn't have the know-how yet to do that. The thing is, I won't until it's happening. Which is how you learn to manage money and buy a house and pay bills. Everyone figures it out as they go along, but growing up, that's something I could never have comprehended or guessed at.
And I'm sure my mother had this realization, and maybe even my grandmother or grandfather. But this is mine. This is it. My closet is changing from t-shirts and jeans and chucks to flats and heels and slacks and khakis and dressy tops. My boyfriend's side is morphing from tie-dye tees and ironic Woot t-shirts to dress shirts and ties and polos. Our alarms go off before 8 a.m. I use a tank of gas a week to get to work when I have been riding a bike or a bus or my own two feet for 5 years. I am able to watch 1, maybe 2 hour-long episodes of TV a night. Not of my shows, mind you, but ones both Bogey and I are watching because that's the only time we have to hang out. Due to evening time constraints, I also only get to read for about an hour a night, a book I would probably read in one sitting because I'm so into it. I haven't even found time to go in my study room and write. I used to spend hours sitting in front of my computer, on tumblr, then youtube, doing whatever I wanted, then writing. But there's no time to dillydally. If I want to write, I can't wait for the inspiration, I have to schedule it in and just do it. But I haven't. Inside, I feel like my creative energy, my storylines and ideas are bottled up, fizzing under the surface like raw energy, just waiting to be used but I can't bring myself to find the time. I think I'm so attached to my old life still, the time and the non-structure of it, that I can't bring myself to give up TV or reading or any one thing, but it's my writing that is getting hurt worst because I come home and that would be the ideal time to write--6 p.m. or so, but instead, Bogey's there and I want to see him, so we flop on the couch and watch TV and soon, it's 8 p.m. and I'm not feeling it anymore. I don't know how to make it work. I'm changing and how I function in every day life is changing and I feel like I'm trying to grasp at grains of sand that are slipping through my fingers because I'm not sure I'm ready to live this way. This rigid schedule and zero time for anything and this eating healthy business and the 8-5 job with morning traffic commute and I just feel like I'm spiraling sometimes!!!
And I do spiral. All I've been able to focus on this week is how much I hate the commute. How much I'm starting to dislike my job. How much I'm not writing, which I then internalize and start being angry at myself. I'm afraid this unhappiness is going to spread. The thing is, this place might hire me full time at the end of the internship in August. With that, comes PTO and possibly benefits. I'd be stupid not to take it. But what if I start hating my life? What if I never find time to WRITE?? Writing is my life, my being, my breathing and thinking, all day all the time, my brain is always imagining parts of a story. It's what makes me feel alive.
When I get too focused on something I'm unhappy about, I fail to see the big picture. My life will not always be like this. This will not be my career. And someday, I'll get to the point where I'm at a job I love, because I know myself and I know I won't stop until that's true. I will find time to write because if I don't, I'll die or explode and I'm not willing for that to happen. I'm only 24. My life is just beginning. I repeat these things and try not to think that the author of Divergent is 24 too, that Emma Stone is a year younger than me, that my good friend LP is in LA making clothing lines and being in music videos and modeling. I just need to focus on me. I know better than anyone that everyone has a different timeline in their paths of life.
So. I'm becoming an adult. I still squeal about Disney movies and cry to Doctor Who, and eat popsicles, but I also I wear slacks to work and drink 2 cups of coffee a day, and work 8-5 and I don't even have time to color my hair, let alone read a magazine for fun. But I am functioning. And life will get better.
Today I will go home. And I will either run with my bf and then shower and eat and then write, or I will go write and then do the following activities. But I will write. And if I can do that, just for an hour even, I will have succeeded for the day.
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