This is your life, too.

The Sunday Dreads Vol. 47

I have very few solid memories of college, probably because I spent most of those four years pickling myself in a brine of cheap beer and shame, and because on more than one occasion I woke up concussed on the floor of a bar after simply…falling down drunk with only the sticky, rotting wood floor beneath me to soften the blow.

But I do remember sitting in our living room at 1928 Cleneay in Norwood, Ohio, on a warm day in May 2005, with my roommate Erin.

It was almost finals week, which meant we were nearly to the end of our college experience. And wow, were we overwhelmed. We had papers to write. Exams to take. Books to sell back for beer money. An entire house of mostly broken furniture to empty out before we set off for whatever was next.

We were so stressed!!!!!!

Erin said something like, I can’t wait to just be done with college and have a job. Not homework and a job. Just a job.

I nodded, like, yeah.

Just think of all the free time we’ll have, she said.

And I nodded, like, yeah, totally.

{INSERT A HEARTY LOL! THOSE SWEET LITTLE DUMMIES THOUGHT ADULTHOOD WOULD BE BETTER THAN COLLEGE OH MY GOD!!}

We only ever know what we know, and Erin and I both knew very little about adulthood. We paid $300 a month each for a room in a dilapidated house we mostly used for sleeping and partying. The bathroom tub hadn’t ever fully drained, and we regularly showered in several inches of each other’s filth, though we didn’t think of it that way.

We did think that adulthood would be easier than college, that we would simply go to work, do the work, and then leave the work at our desks. We each had a flip phone and hardly ever checked our email. We could not have conceived of the Girl Bossery to come, the ways in which we would make our work into our lives, and stoke the fires of our own burnout.

I thought, on that day and many others, that I was in a waiting room. That soon, a door would open and a woman (always a woman) with a clipboard would call my name and usher me across a threshold where my Actual Life was waiting.

I was in a practice round called college, or high school, or new adulthood.

Someday, my life would arrive.

This week, a man who kicks a ball for a living told a group of new graduates a bunch of dumb stuff and we all got pretty mad about it even though getting mad at a dumb man is as useless as getting mad at a cat. Yell all you want, both of them are going to look at you blankly and then walk across your pillow after they’ve stepped in their own poop¹.

The man whose wife takes care of him and his children so he can fulfill his vocation of kicking a ball believes that the highest vocation for a woman is marrying (a man, duh) and having children.

He spoke for his wife, and said that she would agree that marriage and motherhood is when her life really began.

What else could matter? What else could compare?

Everything. All of it.

The sound of your roommate singing along to a new band called Maroon 5 on her 3-disc changer; the mattress and box spring you inherited from the last girl who lived in this crooked attic room with the window that won’t stay open.

Mrs. Murphy’s wide-wale kelly green corduroys and the fact she taught you the Cornell method of note taking in seventh grade. Writing thinly-veiled erotic fan fic about your teachers in middle school with your best friends, whose landlines you can still recite from memory.

Wasting billable hours updating your MySpace at a job you barely tolerate and barely tolerates you; waiting for your boss to leave for the day so you can power down your computer and drink $3 margaritas and $5 burritos with your roommates; wasting valuable hours of sleep checking your flip phone to see if that guy ever called you (he didn’t).

The boredom. The stress. The soul-deep ache of watching a boy dance with another girl to Aerosmith’s I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing, the clink of his teeth against yours when you finally have your first kiss a year later. Pretending to fall asleep in the back seat so your dad will carry you inside. The fact that he knew you were faking and did it anyway.

This is your life, too.

Most of us are not new graduates, but even so, we might still be waiting for our lives to begin. To appear before us fully-formed and ready to play, no assembly required. We might be waiting to reach a destination that feels like…something.

But we’re here, now. Wherever we are, with whatever we have.

I will never again be 22 and able to survive on one hour of sleep, a few Red Bulls and some Camel Lights (they were free at the bar! Ohio was a weird place!). I will never again be 41, telling my sweaty children that it’s not that hot (it is) and we’ll turn the air on when it’s hot-hot (it’s hot. It’s already hot. Why am I like this).

There is not some secret code, some unknown level of expertise we will unlock where it all makes sense. Where life - real life - the kind an NFL kicker could really respect - kicks in.

This is your life.

Whatever it looks like, whatever it feels like, however it does or does not measure up to the expectations you had when you were younger and sweeter and undoubtedly dumber in many ways and smarter in others.

There is more to come. More to hope for. More to wait for.

But there is plenty here already.

This is your life, too.

To Listen:

If you’d like to hear some encouragement for the new grad in all of us, we have 5-10 minute talks Kate Kennedy, Caroline Moss and Danielle Robay on It’s Going To Be OK this week. They’re all brilliant.

I was thrilled to discuss the new Kathleen Hanna memoir on Glamorous Trash with Chelsea Devantez.

We asked TTFA listeners to tell us what makes their family “different.” And the heartwarming truth is that we’re all...normal?

Paul Ditty

started Time Capsule with a mystery. And he SOLVED IT! Binge the whole series wherever you get podcasts (Apple link is here).

To Read:

For The Fairy Godmothers

Have you heard of mental health?

Literally every skincare product I use.

To Buy:

Nike has an extra 25% off a bunch of their best stuff right now with code SUMMER25, but nothing is cuter than these unisex Air Max, which they have in every size except mine.

Tula’s friends and family sale is right now, which means you get 20% off! All of my favorites are linked in the article above.

These hair pins are my new favorite thing. Way easier than bobby pins for pulling my hair back!

PS - If you like my writing, you might like my new happyish oracle deck: a pack of affirmation cards to get you through the hard things in life. There’s also a happyish journal, based on my own journaling practice, and created to deprogram us all from centuries of toxic positivity.

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1. This is not cat slander, but it is Dumb Man slander.