Tonight I was talking with my sister about the societal pressures associated with graduating from college, and all the significant life steps that often follow graduating, including marriage, buying a house, having kids, etc. She’s 28 and about 6 months from graduating, I’m 21 and about 2-2.5 years from doing so, and we both currently live with my dad and her mom.
I told her that the majority of my friends with whom I started college have recently graduated, and are moving on to the next steps in their lives. A couple friends got or are getting married, one close friend is due to have a baby this fall, several friends are moving on to graduate school, and most of the remainder are moving onto “real” jobs that hopefully fall into their field of study. I’m doing none of these things, and neither is my sister. I’m contented living at home, at least until I graduate and have a full time job, so that I’m more financially stable. She, on the other hand, has only lived here sporadically, and is ready to move out again, mostly because she feels that, as a 28 year old woman, she should not be living with her parents. But both of us feel the same intense inadequacy for not meeting getting to these major life checkpoints in the same timely manner as our peers.
At some point in our conversation, I said to her, that I feel that even though it has taken her a significant amount of time to finish her college degree, it doesn’t seem like she is affected by the societal pressures which deem that she should be in a different life-stage than she currently is. I said, “It seems like you’re just like, ‘Eff you, world; I do what I want!’” She responded that she feels like I exemplify this attitude to a much greater extent than she does. And really, neither of us actually feels like that on the inside.
For all of the confidence and status quo negation and free-spiritedness that we both have on the outside, both of us are frustrated and sad, and we feel like we are letting down people who care about us. But both of us are trying with all our might to prevent that from showing.
I’ve said before that my policy in regards to confidence and happiness is “Fake it until you make it,” and I think that is true. But tonight, our conversation seemed to confirm what I have long suspected, which is that most of us in the world are in fact faking it.
I think we’re all afraid that we’re disappointing someone, even if that someone is ourselves. We are all broken and we are all flawed, but we try very hard to cover up those cracks in order to seem like a better person: brighter, shinier, prettier, happier, more confident than we are. We’re all running so hard and so fast to escape the disappointment of a life that is not what we expected it would be. I know I am. I thought that by now I would be graduated, working in a great job, ready to settle down and start the next chapter of my life. But, I am none of those things.
However, I think that if I, and I think that if we all really looked around us, at the things that we have, the joys that we have experienced, the things that we have learned, and the places we still have left to go, we might realize that we are pretty happy, and that our life is pretty good. Our jobs and our dysfunctional families and our crazy friends and our often nonexistent love lives aren’t really all that terrible, and sometimes, they’re even pretty awesome. And we might have been happy all this time if we stopped trying to meet arbitrary expectations and just enjoyed the journey we are taking.
I think that is an important thing for me, in particular to remember. I wouldn’t want to change the person I’ve become, or let go of the things that I’ve learned because of the path that I’ve taken. It’s been wrought with points of great struggle, but also points of overwhelming beauty. My life might not turn out the way I thought it would, but it’s pretty great so far, anyway.
"I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page concurrently."
- Donald Miller
