Sometimes, I feel like I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing: going to school for an unusual major that will most likely be responsible for many years of unemployment, living in the city that moves me, writing about life and love and how it makes me burn.
But sometimes, I feel like I’m not. I feel like I’m just following the path being taken by millions of other American 19-year-olds.
We start planning our entire lives at the age of 14. We worked hard in high school to get good grades and impress college acceptance committees with transcripts we embellished with every good deed we’d ever done. Once we got into the college of our choice, we graduated, left our friends, and learned beautiful, exciting lessons about ourselves in campus classrooms so far away from home.
In college, we’re supposed to find perspective. Make lifelong friends. Vote. Get active about politics, start worrying about global warming and world hunger. Excel. Graduate. Get a job, a spouse, a family (and all in that order–otherwise, what the hell were they thinking?!).
Sixty years later, after grandchildren, retirement, and nursing homes, die.
Life accomplished.
I started planning my life too early, far before the time I knew anything about what I wanted life to mean to me. I was fifteen when schools started sending me glossy brochures and catalogs bearing the faces and stories of yuppy college kids wrapped head-to-toe in their school’s colors, making promises of success and money and knowledge, making me think that I would only find happiness if I lived my life with the exact same plans of all those students in those shiny pictures.
I made plans. Wrote them down, actually. And if everything goes accordingly, I’ll have the rest of my life decided for me within the next 5 or 6 years.
THE PLAN:
1. Graduate in less than 4 years.
2. Meet the man I’ll marry by the time I’m 22.
3. Marry after graduation, or no less than 6 years from now.
4. Have kids within the next 7 or 8 years.
5. Establish a career, go to graduate school, write two novels, all before I’m 30.
I actually wrote this down, thought this out, and convinced myself I wanted this. And I panic, sometimes, thinking about what would happen if my plans failed. If I’m not engaged until 30, I never go to graduate school, and that book deal isn’t signed until I’m 40.
But sometimes, in the middle of this flying crashing anxiety, I wonder if maybe the most beautiful thing that could ever happen to me would be if none of these things went as planned, if it all failed and flopped and fell in a heap of forgotten dreams.
Maybe, maybe, that’s where I’d finally find life.
