This Is Me Then
And yes, I stole that title from a J.Lo CD. Anyway, the coming of spring has me in a contemplative mode. Spring has sprung and for the first time I don't have a summer of utter freedom and tanning ahead of me. A year ago I walked across the stage at the Cintas Center at Xavier University, received my diploma, and, as my friend Ryan put it, dipped my toes into the real world only to find that the water was icy at best.
So in honor of that first taste of chaos and insecurity, I give you this, a portion of an essay written weeks after my graduation:
I am in transit, in emotional meltdown, and incommunicado. My broken cell phone sits on the dashboard of my car, my stereo is playing Cat Steven’s “Wild World,” and I am alternately singing along and crying as I drive exactly the speed limit through Highway-Patrol ridden Indiana. It is the day after my college graduation, and my Honda Civic is packed with all of my earthly belongings, most of which are clothes and shoes, and my mind is packed with racing thoughts about my straight-arrow past and my uncertain future.
Every song on the radio seems to send me spinning into nostalgia or falling into melancholy. I am convinced that every song has been written just for me and my journey out of the academic cocoon. A dance song comes on and I think of my friends and I getting ready to go out on the weekends, crowding in front of the bathroom mirror with mascara wands and straightening irons. A rock song comes on and I remember dancing and singing in our bedrooms with the stereo blaring. Songs remind me of our long conversations on the front porch, of our Saturday morning trips to Bruegger’s Bagels, of Burger Madness on Monday nights. I am coming from four glorious years of college in Ohio, but where am I going? Besides the obvious answer of my parent’s house, I have no idea. Stevie Nicks sings to me, “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?” and I choke out the next lyrics, “Ooooh, I don’t know. Oooooh, I don’t know.”
Just yesterday I walked across a stage, received a piece of paper, and ended my life as I have known it for the past 17 years. While some people couldn’t wait to be done with homework, tests, and essays, I couldn’t imagine life without them. I felt as if I had built my life around my GPA, and there was nothing for me outside the walls of the classroom. Like many kids my age, I am used to doing what I am told to do and being rewarded for it. The educational system is based on obedience and rewards. Read the story, write the essay, get an A. Do the math homework, take the test, get an A. School sports and activities follow the same criteria. I was the child who believed in the permanent record, in some unknown but all-knowing entity keeping a meticulous list of your accomplishments and shortcomings. I worked hard to make sure that my permanent record was gleaming. At age 10, I wrote in my journal, “I just feel like I could be doing more with my life” and I guess I never shook that feeling. I always want to be doing more, but I’m not sure what I want to be doing.
My business major friends lined up jobs in March, buying suits and pumps for interviews, obsessively checking Monster.com while I sat in my room reading and making my lists of things to do in the next day and week. Most of them read: 1) Revise Resume 2) Apply for jobs. At parties people traded stories about their worst interview experiences, the jobs they were after, and the jobs they had turned down. I would laugh at the appropriate moments and try my best not to scream, “What the hell am I going to do with my life? I’m doomed!!!”
My brief flirtation with the working world came through my internships at a magazine and at an alternative newspaper, and with my occasional Internet job searches. The internships, I was sure, would be my ticket into employment. After all, I was a contributing writer to a business magazine and a do-it-all intern at a small newspaper. I sent out resumes and completed job applications in every field that interested me and got my first taste of rejection. Public Relations, Advertising, and Journalism wanted nothing to do with Nora E. M*Inerny, soon-to-be Bachelor of Arts.
Why is the prospect of an undecided future so stressful for me but not for others? I am a girl who values family, friends, good books, and rainstorms on summer nights. But above all, I value order. I like to know when and where things are going to happen, and then I like to be on time for them. On my first day of Kindergarten, I waited at the bus stop a full hour before it was scheduled to pick me up. The bus stop was my own driveway. That year, before I went to sleep, I laid my clothes out in the shape of a person. To make it even more efficient, I laid according to which piece of clothing I would need first; underpants on top of the pants, socks nestled into the shoes.
My whole life I’ve done what I was supposed to do, and I’ve enjoyed it. But after college there is no next step decided for you. For the first time, life is exclusively yours to live without a syllabus to tell you what to read next, without a calendar to tell you about the next test, without an advisor to tell you which route to follow. I am almost indignant about my shapeless future. I was the girl who prioritized studying over partying, I was the girl who found two internships for her senior year, I was the girl who ate the proper amount of vegetables each day. I even drove a sensible car! Where is the justice?
I arrive at my parent’s house in Minneapolis after 10 hours in a car. I move my life from the back of my car to the garage and I head upstairs to my room. This is the same room I had when I was 10-years-old, infatuated with the Louisa May Alcott to the point that I had my entire room decorated in floral wallpaper, which I thought was exactly what she would like. The wallpaper is peeling a bit now, but it is still that cheerful and almost dizzying pattern of blue flowers. This was the room where I wrote my first “novel,” the thrilling story of the lives of my Grandmother’s cats, told through their eyes. There was something like 25 chapters, each chapter being 2 pages long in sixteen-point font.
This was the room where I wrote my college essays, secure in the fact that even if I didn’t know where I’d be going to college next year, I knew I’d be in college. This is my room again today, and for the foreseeable future. In the mornings I know that my father will grind the coffee and turn on National Public Radio on full volume to wake me up. I know that my mom will take the bus to work and my dad will go to the golf course. I have no idea what I will be doing, and that makes me nervous. I lay awake that night thinking of different places to send my resume, different careers I might enjoy, or even different graduate programs I might consider. I turn on the light to make myself a list.
If you got this far, congratulations. You have an above average attention span in an ADD world. I bet you read The New Yorker, too, don't you? You're clever and I like you. I bet you have neat glasses and drink herbal teas. Perhaps you enjoy academic endeavors in your leisure time, and take in plays on the weekends. I like you already. And if this wasn't enough for you, if you can't get enough of my narcissistic ravings and egocentric yapping, you can read the next essay by clicking below.
It has been two weeks since I graduated Magna Cum Laude from a Jesuit University. I have sent out resumes and scoured the online job websites. I have devoured Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” relating with the protagonist’s utter hopelessness for her future despite her sterling past. I have listened to countless sad songs by sad British bands. I have spontaneously burst into tears at least once a day. I have developed a narcissistic and self-defeating attitude, and I am fine with that.
Four years ago, I sat in my bedroom and stared out the window, wondering what the future held for me. College seemed an exotic and foreign landscape. I would be leaving this comfortable house in Minneapolis and setting out for the great unknown: Ohio. It would be like Felicity or Dawson’s Creek. I would be living in communion with kids my age. There would be little supervision. There would be no parents. There would be beer and drugs and the lawlessness of life lived in a young-adult Neverland, a sort of pseudo-independence where you are free from your parents and yet far from living on your own. College was a mystery to me in many ways, but at least I knew that there would be a syllabus.
Today, I am sitting in my bedroom in my parents’ house, staring out of the same window and typing on the latest in a series of computers purchased for me because, as my parents often said, I was worth every penny. Now the pennies have all been spent, the last tuition check mailed. I have crossed the stage and received my diploma in front of an audience of mostly strangers. I have no job. I have overdrawn my checking account. I’ve begun to think that those pennies were wasted on me, that if I were going to end up calling all of my former babysitting charges and begging their parents to go out on dates I could have just as easily skipped the B.A. In many ways, my life has not changed much since I was a child. I wake up in the same bedroom, I remain friends with the same people, I have the same boyfriend, and I live with the same two people who have raised me my entire life.
I’ve begun to realize that I am stagnating in a pool of my own failure. No, I am an outright failure. My report card was so filled with A’s that I almost began to tire of them. My failure is not what I didn’t do in school, but what I didn’t do afterward. My entire academic career has been preparing me for something, of this I am sure. But for what?
My mother boldly suggested the other day that I go to a job fair for a financial services company. After reviewing their job posting in the newspaper, I realized that the job would require me to call delinquent credit card holders and ‘encourage’ them to pay their bills. I immediately had visions of sitting at a cubicle with a telephone headset on and seeing my own name popping up on my computer screen followed by a string of people I knew from grade school or from church. Do they allow you to skip phone calls due to conflict of interest? Because nearly everyone I know has gotten an ‘encouraging’ phone call from a credit card company, and it isn’t the kind of phone call you relish.
But it wasn’t the job duties itself that bothered me, it was more the fact that my mother would suggest that I attend a job fair where the only filter was that one was required to show proof of a High School diploma or a GED. I had just graduated MAGNA CUM LAUDE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. If you don’t speak Latin, that means, I’M BETTER THAN THIS SHIT. I’m not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from, but those three words on my diploma seem to be telling me that working as a bank teller, a file clerk, a grocery bagger or a kindergarten teacher would all be a slap in my smart little face. Those words, however, have nothing against living with my parents and spending my summer in a haze of ice cream, novel-reading, and flagrant unemployment.
Most depressing was how my life would look to an outsider. “Oh, look at the poor little white girl! She’s been given everything and now she doesn’t know what to do with it!” Yes, I had the same life I had when I was 17, but was that really so bad? After all, this life has given me the relative luxury of basically sitting on my ass for a whole month and feeling sorry for myself. There are people out there willing to do anything and everything to get where they wanted to be, but of course I don’t know where I want to be. I could hear the sickening sound of my own cries even as I wept to my mother that I didn’t know what to do with myself.
For Christ’s sake, I thought! Pull yourself together! I stared at the shelf where my father had set my diploma, my Honors cord draped over it like a shrine to my lost potential. It seemed a mockery of each paper I had written, or each final exam I had aced. Slowly, the letters in Magna Cum Laude rearranged inside my mind. Magna Cum Laude, Latin for “doesn’t mean shit.” I swallowed my pride and asked my mother for the Sunday Jobs section. Maybe being a file clerk ain’t so bad after all.
Yeah, and look at you now. Things have a way of coming together. One step back, two steps forward.
"but time makes you bolder
even children get older
and i'm getting older too"
(Billy Corrigan version)
I graduated from a prestigious Ivy League college in 1990, convinced I was different from (and so much better than) all those other Ivy League graduates chasing the big money in Wall Street. I wanted to go down a different, more exciting path. So, naturally, I ended up going to work for a department store chain in Hartford, Connecticut as an assistant buyer for men's activewear. Obviously, I found this to be extremely fulfilling. So, after a year, I quit and came back to Minnesota where I promptly took over as the manager of the Hickory Farms kiosk in the Eden Prairie mall. Finally, I had found my true calling, serving beefstick samples. But, the feeling was fleeting, so I moved in with my friend in Dallas, Texas where we plotted how we could open our own bar (he eventually did, now he has three) and when we got bored with that, we went to Las Vegas and won a lot of money playing blackjack (seriously!), enough to allow us to follow the Grateful Dead for awhile and, when the tour went east, I ended up as a "housesitter" at my friend's house in Lake Tahoe and told people I was writing a novel. I wasn't. At the end of the summer, because no one had yet conducted an intervention on me, I ended up in law school somehow.
And just look at me now. How did I ever get here? When you reallly think about it, it's kind of a bummer to think about what could have been. Because I could have been the head buyer by now.
I could've written the same things after I graduated. But I didn't, because I'm not the writer you are. More details on my own blog.
Miss you, see ya soon.
Nora,
While it is true that we were relatively close friends in high school, I feel like I never really got to know you until now. Nearly five years later and I am just now learning the real you. In reading your blog, it gives me a sense of comfort as a new grad, to know what i am not alone in the feelings I am having about my life and accomplishments to date.
You are an amazing writer and an even more amazing person.
Even though I will soon be a teacher, I won't take offense to the comment about "kindergarten teachers". :)
Ana
Nora,
Ryan already said it, but I have to add: You're the best. EVER. I, too, am looking forward to seeing you this summer.
--paddyboy (non brother)
I am just dealing with this, too--after 20 (!) years in school, what the heck am I actually good for? ('Teaching poetry' is the official answer, but, hmmm, there's not glut of poetry professorships out there.)
Actually, I did just get an academic job, so THANK GOD, I'll be back in the safe zone, come September. But you know, I was really panicing for a while.
I really enjoy your writing!
Nora-
You are an amazing person and friend, you should be proud of that. I miss more than anything and I cannot wait to see you. You are also the best writer, I love you blog!
Beven
A friend of mine can relate everything in life to a horse race. If I were a betting person,I'd put all my money on you. Smart,enthusiastic talented and BRAVE,thats you.
Keep up the great work on your blog. Best wishes WaltDe