The Second Day of the Rest of Your Life

Well, it happened again. In the back of another cab, a guy in his twenties sitting next to me praying the driver will take a credit card because he doesn’t have any cash. He doesn’t bless me when I sneeze. I wonder if he spends any time thinking about how his life is going to turn out.

I’m writing again because we’re drifting again–further from who we used to be, identities that we clung to, and closer to who we’ll be for the rest of our lives. Isn’t that kind of terrifying? In many ways, you will be who you are right now for the rest of your life. People change, sure, incrementally. You grow up. You mature. You can say you’re not that person anymore, whatever you used to do. You become more sure of yourself. But sometimes a little good or bad from the past sneaks into the present and you’re right back to 20 years old again, feeling things for people you shouldn’t care about anymore, or like you should’ve made different choices.

As I’ve moved on from college–as I nestle a little further into the secondhand smoke of this cab, despite myself–I’ve had to get okay with that: the idea that life happens the way it happens and you can’t control anything. I’ve always been a little bit of a control freak, for the things that matter. When people react to my feelings or actions in different ways than I expect, or when my life doesn’t fit the picture I’ve had in my head, or I have everything but it still feels like something inexplicable is missing, it’s dizzying. It makes me try to claw the control back. It makes me live in the past, the point in time where I could’ve made a change. It makes me unsteady. And unspooling that, learning how to live with the unspooling, with each little catastrophe? That’s probably part of who I’m going to be for the rest of my life.

This time last year I wrote about a bus ride home from Baltimore and how going back to school made me want to eat my own heart out. At least, in this year, that has changed. I’m different than I was two years ago. I know much more about what I want. I know much more about who I am. I am more comfortable with all parts of myself, even the bad ones. (My therapist would quip that I love being complicated, and yeah, duh. That’s one of the bad traits I am newly comfortable with.) Most importantly, I know what I deserve.

And besides that–now I remember, school wasn’t as fantastic as I remember. There was the bad with the good. I can’t miss it as if it’s some pinnacle of my life. It was the best, in some ways, and I’ll always long for the soothing familiarity of knowing you are where you belong. But I will feel that way again.

Some things have stayed the same these last few years. I’m still chasing a journalism career, which is terrifying in its own right–but I’m much more aware of how terrifying it actually is, now. I still have the best friends and family. I still have anxiety. I still reach too far into people sometimes, so that they recoil. I’m still waiting to meet the man who doesn’t. I still want an exceptional life. It’s just taken me awhile to see that I deserve one.

I’m also flawed, in ways that are hard to swallow. And more than that–I’m still far away from where I thought I’d be right now. In college I thought…I thought that after graduation, I’d most definitely have a plum job at a major newspaper, I’d walk straight into it, I’d move into the city immediately, I wouldn’t have time to miss school or the whispers of proximity to so many people I cared about that I’d never have again. I would barrel right forward. I wouldn’t have time to think about everything I’m thinking about now. And that’s what I wanted, actually. Thinking too hard is usually what gets me in trouble.

None of that happened. I haven’t moved out, I don’t have that plum reporting job. Yet.

And god, I have so much time to think.

Remember that thing I said about being okay with it? Yeah, for a long time I wasn’t, and I’m still not. It’s hard. It’s hard to reframe my life around reality, not idealism. It’s hard not to pin not having met the love of my life yet on something that I did wrong. Its hard to look at other people and want to know their secrets to being happy. It’s hard to look at my career prospects and realize my penchant for fast boredom and relentless truth-seeking means investigative journalism really is the only thing I’ll be happy doing. It’s hard to be okay with being 23 and not knowing anything yet. I’ve always been ruthlessly, unnervingly impatient. And intense about everything, impatience included. That’s another thing that’s going to stick with me forever.

But the fact of it is I am 23. If I knew how the rest of my life would look right now, that might be pretty boring. And my feelings might be messy and complicated, but my life is real, and it’s definitely not boring. I’ve known this for a long time and I know it more now: there’s beauty in the fight, in the tension. Getting down into the dirt of it is how you change things. Thinking is how you get to know yourself–and that’s how you get to know others. Your thoughts might exist on two sides of an extreme pendulum, but at least you have them. As much as I’ve wished, in the past, not to feel so much…feeling this much lets me know I’m alive.

The fact of it is I will move. Very soon, and I’m so excited, but it’s a little heartbreaking too, leaving the three people again who have shepherded me through taking back my mental health. The three people who have showed me things will turn out okay.

And I will get that reporting job, because I want it, because I’m good enough for it–but then one day I’ll be through with that beat and I’ll pick up a new one. And maybe I won’t be the best, because there will always be someone better. But that’s okay. And as much as it might feel crazy to let pieces of the past slip into the present, sometimes it can be a positive. You can discover parts of yourself you thought were gone.

I will meet someone who won’t be scared of all this, even the dark parts, even the anxiety. I know it’s possible–I see it every day in the people I love. I will be able to handle the set of circumstances life throws at me, because not handling it is not an option. I will. That’s the point: you think you can’t, but then you do.

This past summer I was driving to the train station with my dad when we passed a dead raccoon in the road. Someone had placed an orange traffic cone next to the body, a redundancy.

Don’t run over the dead raccoon, my dad joked. Don’t run it over again and again and again.

What he doesn’t know is most drivers can’t help themselves.

But you know what? My dad is right. You can’t keep running the raccoon over. You can’t live in the past or the future. You can’t change anything. You are where you are right now. You’re in it, you feel it, you have to live with it.

That summer morning with my dad our old Honda Pilot floated over the road the same way the cab is floating now. The harbor is quiet outside. It’s a little melancholy and a little beautiful. Who I am today, that’s who I’m going to be for the rest of my life. That’s never going to change. We are who we are, malleable and permanent and contradictory as that may be. The little catastrophes, and the big ones, will always be around the corner. But so will the calm. The time when you grasp what you’re looking for, when you finally know the secrets.

Everything comes in time.