May Lessons
On graduating and growing older
It is somehow May again. It has somehow been [redacted] Mays since I graduated college. (A lady never reveals her age.)
I find myself thinking of her, that me of [redacted] Mays ago. What I wish she knew. What I’m glad she didn’t.
On a sweltering late-spring day, after a long weekend of various graduation ceremonies that included an entire speech in Latin and another by Christopher Nolan, my mother backed her Chevy Traverse away from my stony dorm. The car was mounded with four years of detritus, the molt of someone becoming themselves, and I wheeled a single suitcase to New Jersey Transit. 75 minutes later I arrived at Penn Station, the ceilings low and dank (this was pre-renovation, pre-mall-shiny Moynihan), and another 45 minutes later I emerged from the C train at Franklin Street.
Down the street from my apartment, a sagging brownstone I shared with two sisters, I bought shampoo. The shopkeeper slid the bottle to me from behind the Plexiglass barricade where he sat with his wares, visibly amused at this bleary-eyed girl.
Would you believe me if I said this was all just a wind-up to a list of things I wish I’d known when I was 22?
How deeply she wanted to know everything, to be who she would be, to get where she was going.
That feels silly to admit now, in my thirties (a lady sometimes reveals clues about her age), a time when every few months I seem to learn anew that there is no end game. There is only pushing the rock up the hill every day, so you might as well pick a good rock. The whole point of life is to live it, etc.
So what would I tell her?
Perhaps that your twenties are not a time for titles. (There may never be a time for titles.) To collect experiences and learnings and people, not trinkets. (Except the shoes. Collect the weird shoes.)
That time has a way of looping around itself. Steps back become foundations for something new, sturdier.
That the only thing that matters, really, are relationships. Not just in the, “I’m on my deathbed and wish I’d seen my family more way.” In the, “Lightly bully your friends into moving to your neighborhood so you can have tea and catch up spontaneously on a Tuesday,” kind of way. And also in the, “We worked together once and now I want to bring you in to be my coworker again,” kind of way.
That quite literally no one has it figured out. That those who seem to are probably just careening toward a mid-life crisis.
That your early career, and maybe your whole career, is best thought of as an apprenticeship. Who do you want to apprentice under? Only work for people you admire.
That if someone owns an apartment in New York before 30 they have family money. (No shade, just don’t compare yourself.)
Recently I walked by my old apartment. The brownstone is still there, but the store down the street is gone. Even my old coffee shop, that harbinger of gentrification, has been remade into a luxury grocery store.
I wanted to hate it, this shiny gentrified place (doesn’t everyone believe the perfect time to arrive in New York was just before they got there?), but then I saw a group of friends emerge, their bags full of snacks, laughing. They couldn’t have been older than 25.
The point is: things change.
The point is: things can be more beautiful than you ever imagined.
Love so much
gorgeous