transcended.net

(Quote from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I hate to admit this, but I don’t think I’m very happy right now.

Quarter-life crisis? Fancy meeting you here at the corner of my youth and middle-age.

I was watching this movie Post-Grad on HBO, feeling like it was all very relatable until suddenly it hit me. I’m almost seven years out from my under-grad days and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count as being a “post-grad” anymore. I think now it’s just called Being A Real Adult.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that I lived a life of very little responsibility. I was basically responsible for making it home at night in one piece, a task that I, luckily, always managed to do (I confess, there were nights where luck was a bigger factor than others). I had only a vague picture of what my future would look like, in fact I really only had one piece of it worked out (all revolving around the ex, clearly things did not go according to plan) and otherwise the possibilities were endless.

I think this is actually one of the things that scared me the most about buying a home – that feeling of being so completely tied down. Not just to a state or city, but to an actual specific location, an address. I probably never would have run off to Paris for a year, but now I really won’t. Because I have a mortgage to pay. And a property tax bill. And I have a Real Job, also known as My Career, which I can’t blow off the way I probably could have a few short years ago.

I’m not complaining. Really, I’m not. Okay, so I am, a little bit, but my life is good, I know this. Everytime I walk by an old person collecting cans out of the garbage, I feel like the asshole that I am for even having the nerve to bitch silently in my head about this stuff. But I’m just being honest in saying that I do.

I’m only twenty-eight years old and I feel exhausted. Exhausted by all this responsibility. Exhausted by getting up every day for work in the dark, paying bills, cleaning the house (because, yes, I actually am a pretty good housekeeper now), the mundane every day crap that somehow ends up being your whole life. I feel like I don’t know how I got here, like I just want to go back to the days where the biggest problems I had were having to cram for a test or my boyfriend not calling when he said he would. The days when I was thinner, healthier, younger and mobile.

I know I’m glamorizing it. That it’s better in my head than it was in reality. I mean, let’s see, in my early twenties I lived in crappy, dirty apartments and made no money (even when I had a job!). I would routinely eat bags of chips for dinner and I think I was pretty miserably depressed for large periods of time during college.

Do I really want to go back to that? I think not.

Most days, I like that feeling of being a Responsible Adult. I love that I come home in the afternoons to a clean, organized home, one that I contribute to. And I’m so beyond lucky to have a husband who is quite adept at performing domestic duties and willing to share the load. Most days, I am quite content with where I am career-wise and am happy to have a job that I both like and pays well. I’m glad that I can take care of myself financially, that I can pay my bills and save for the future and so on and so forth.

Most days I am not having a quarter-life crisis, but unfortunately today is not most days.