“Go to college”, they said!
“It’ll be fun”, they said!
“It’ll help you get a job”, they said!
Really? Because thirty thousand dollars in debt with a degree that is the equivalent of a degree in underwater basket weaving sure doesn’t sound like the shit my parents promised it would be. Now, I am a realist and understood that they were overselling it in our world of, “you’re special and can do whatever you want.” And yes, yes you can! But you better be dedicated to it, the world isn’t going to give it to you unlike what society sold you.
But shit, was college fun! If I could do it over again I would or just never leave and stay college age forever. I wouldn’t have missed all those opportunities with girls, I wouldn’t have told my friend no to moving in with me and I wouldn’t have dated who I dated, haha! Listen, kids, the people you meet and experiences you have in college will stick with you for the rest of your life so if you do go, make it a fucking blast. And if you don’t, you’re still going to meet people and make experiences that you’ll never ever forget and keep doing it after the “college” years are over.
So…
Being twenty-four and at the average debt level is hard sometimes. Trust me, I have had the occasional panic attack. People ask me all the time, “why did you get such a broad degree?”. Well the answer is that I got it because I (not to toot my own horn) was pretty damn good at it. My thesis paper researching the controversy between a South Park episode and a Muslim group through semantics got me a perfect score from my professor and this woman ate us alive. I did it because I had planned to go to grad school and eventually become a professor. I may well do that someday but I was so burned out in my last year that I started drinking heavily, was depressed and gained about thirty pounds. It was not a pretty sight yet I somehow still pumped out that paper.
On top of me constantly trying to figure out how to not succumb to being in debt for the rest of my life is the dread of not knowing what I want to do with my life. It feels like a ton of people around me are getting married or having kids, etc., etc., while I just moved back home from Tampa after getting my heart crushed (oddly it wasn’t like the last two times my heart was broken, at least in terms of pain) and now am trying to find a job and dodging loan payments. What a fuckin’ shitty way to be living a life, dontcha think? Well, I mean, I had a blast in Tampa and I’m still close with the girl but there’s a distance between us that we feel will close but when that’ll happen, who knows. But the point is, outside the money and trying to figure out what I want to do, everything else is pretty damn interesting.
I have found that though it seems people are moving on, there are a lot of us who are just as lost as we have ever been. What I’m finding is my problem is that while they’re focusing on these things they love I want to do abso-fucking-lutely everthing that my little heart desires. So what do I want to do with my life you ask?!…
I want to write, I want to make music, to backpack, to sail, to travel the world, to experience nature, to meet movers and shakers, thinkers and poets and artists that either do or do not know it. I want out of this room in the house of my childhood, I want to walk in the footsteps of my favorite writers, poets, artists, naturalists, thinkers and blaze my own paths for someone to look back on and say, “Wow.” I want to love the prettiest girls, sleep with the most beautiful women, I want to capture hearts, souls and minds. Hell, maybe I’ll have a kid someday. I want everything and I want nothing…and I don’t know how to fucking do it because it seems that the debt just creeps up and crushes my opportunities by invading my mind (luckily I’ve got it held for six months).
Moving to Tampa was the first time I took those feelings of what I wanted and just followed them. The problem we all have, especially those who have just graduated, is our whole lives were pretty much told to us as to how it would be. Some of us said, “fuck it”, and did their own thing and then some of us got stuck and did our own thing within the confines of what society said we should do. Now we’re realizing how lost those ideas are and how they put us at a loss and search for meaning because we have to create it now once we’re free of that society of growing up.
And that sucks but it’s a part of life and growing up, err…taking responsibility. I plan to be a kid at heart forever, but just one that understands the responsibilities of being an adult. So much to do and so little time, so much to do and so little time. We, or at least I, am so goddamn alive yet at times feel so dead and downtrodden when “reality” sets in.
How to begin, that is the question at this point on my lips, how do I just say fuck it and begin…
For the Rest of Us... 