It feels eerily surreal to sit at a desk in an office building with large glass panel walls, and trendy concrete floors, with a trendy 'open office floor plan' which still has offices for all the higher ups. This shell of a trendy urban office space, tucked away in an Atlanta suburb feels morbidly mundane.
I take a deep breath and move on to the seemingly endless string of tasks that my clients send in. This is my life. Wake up at 7:30, have a cup of tea, do my make up, snuggle the cat, do my hair, change, leave the house by 8:45, get to work by nine, have a cup of coffee, work, work, work, lunch, work, work, walk around the office park, work work, drive home by 6:30 if I'm lucky, make dinner, work on art projects, take a bath, sleep; repeat. If my day was a sheet of music it'd be the kind that kids learned to play a beginner level instrument with. It would be all single notes, repeated in increasingly high octaves until their teacher or their parents couldn't stand the screeching any more.
This year I'll be twenty-six years old. Many of you are sighing as you read that, twenty-six is so young you might think. However for me it'll be the oldest I've ever been. It feels very downhill, I am entering the second half of my twenties. A time when I should have been figuring out to do with my life, but in typical millennial fashion I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out me.
I read in an article recently a popular icon for twenty-something women reflect on turning twenty five. She mentioned that it was almost frightening because society sees any one under twenty-five still a child, so many young people approaching this age feel a sense of loosing their ability to fail. The real world suddenly feels all the more real when you don't have a soft landing spot of being 'the modern child'.
Reading that summary, and thinking about the women in my family, or women that I know when they were my age this seems very true.
By the time my mother was twenty-six she had two children, and traveled full time with my father and his band. My grandmother had three children, and owned an auto repair shop with my grandfather. I at twenty-six am single, with no children, and a job that I wouldn't consider my career. It's hard not to compare myself to traditional successes like that, by the time they were my age the defining women in my life had the standard "got it together" badges. Meanwhile I still talk to my cat as if he will answer and marathon Vampire flicks, followed by Disney flicks (I mean c'mon a girl has to sleep). But life isn't a comparison game. I have a lot of things down in life that women of those generations never had the chance to have. I live on my own and have a lot of things about me figured out. (I.e I am a serious introvert, but I love going out and being extroverted. I know a paradox, but I accept this about me.)
I find myself on the downside of twenty staring down a lot things in my future. (Imagine John Wayne having a stand off with his life choices as the bad guy.) At thirty, do I still want to be trapped behind a desk playing the same beginner sheet music? I know that don't. But how do I live a life where I pop out for lunch covered in paint, following cobblestones to tea room where no speaks English?
Should I sell that guitar, or should I learn to play it? What does a life where I sing for a living look like?
Could I even be creative full time? Do I need to play office worker to fund that sort of lifestyle?
What do I want to be when I grow up?
Staring at the down side of twenty, I realize that I don't want to do anything in halves, I want to dive head first into a passion and I want to swim in it. Completely soaked to the bone in it. If it's business, if it's art, if it's singing, what ever IT is. I want to be completely devoted to something that makes me happy.
I'm not scared of the next four years, or the next few months, or the next few hours, but I'm ready to start something that means something. It's uneasy, but, it's time, I can feel it in my bones.
In the video I have above there is a verse that I think sums up the thoughts going though my head right now:
And once you asked me well what's my biggest fear
That things would always remain so unclear
That one day I'd wake up all alone
With a big family and emptiness deep in my bones
That I would be so blinded, turn a deaf ear
And that my fake laugh would suddenly sound sincere
I don't want to get the place where I feel the need to justify why I didn't do something. I'm looking for me in the form of the future and I'm willing to look like I don't have it all together to get there.
