Today I received an email from my university kindly notifying me that it has been six months since my graduation. This might have evoked a warm chuckle from a different alumna—one who is on the righteous post-graduation track, sitting at their office job among their other smugly employed coworkers. But not this one. Half a year after graduation, I thought I’d have half a year of professional experience on my resume. Spoiler alert: I don’t.
In the past six months, I graduated from college and started a full-time job at a digital marketing agency, and quit. Then I came this close to moving to Bend, but didn’t. Then to Bellingham… but didn’t.
I’m currently taking in the view from the back porch of this tropical bungalow while a chicken scours around my feet in the quest for a stray morsel of something. The scene (pictured) is rivaling the majesty of my anxiety-reducing landscape screensaver. I’m in Waimea, a town on the southwestern coast of the Island of Kauai. I have a chilled glass of white wine. The November air is mild and warm. A reality which I don’t even want to tell anyone that I know, because they all have jobs. And want me dead.
This is not at all what I thought I would be doing this fall. I thought I would be at my previously-secured starter job, merrily going about my work, contributing to society. Things hardly ever work out the way we anticipate, but I’m not going to complain to you about my current circumstances. I’m only here because my uncle invited me along on his hard-earned vacation last minute, and I just so happen to have access to discounted airfare through two parents in the airline industry. Apparently, God is good. Plus, I thought it would be a good way to kill time while I count the days until I go home and unravel my life.
By unravel my life, I specifically mean that I am packing up and storing away my belongings, and moving out of my home to go on a “Finding Myself” trip. And yes there is a copy of Eat Pray Love tucked in my purse for good measure.
I have long hated myself for the following admission, but it must be said: Ironically, despite my parents’ professions and corresponding flight benefits, I am not a “traveler.” Unlike the author of Eat Pray Love, I have never experienced a prolonged desire to escape or to leave my home behind—I chose a college in my hometown so I didn’t have to be far away, and I turn into a weepy homesick four-year-old when I’m out of town for even few days. My attachment to Portland has been unwavering my entire life, until about five months ago.
It all started when I was sitting at a desk in a downtown office, working a job that I’d earned in my field of study—absolutely, desperately miserable, very much aware that Portland is the only town that I’ve lived in my entire life, and could be the only town I live in until I die. So I quit. And while many people will find that decision selfish or reckless or downright stupid—all adjectives that ran through my head more than once—I choose to think of myself as pragmatic, because the truly stupid thing to do would have been to double-down on that misery if I don’t have to.
I spent the next few weeks (i.e. months) taking trips, haphazardly interviewing with potential employers, driving from town to town in the Pacific Northwest in search of the location of the new chapter in my life. With no divine revelation to show for these months, the cold of fall was creeping in, and with it, a fresh wave of pure panic—the summer is over, and I was still in purgatory.
So, one day less than a few weeks ago, my mom told me to put a pause on looking for work, pack a backpack and do what twenty-somethings do—aimlessly travel around the world until something in your mind clicks and your path becomes clear… or you get tired of it and come home and go to work. Through sobs of self-pity and gratitude, I agreed and accepted her generous proposition.
Next week, I move out of my apartment, my comfort zone for the last three years (no big deal), to become a very privileged brand of homeless—the kind where you entire future is open and absolutely undetermined, in the best possible way.
For once, it’s an assignment without any deadlines or turn-in dates being thrust upon me. One in which I can determine the thesis, body and conclusion. Weak writing metaphors aside… it is a terribly uncomfortable feeling for a girl who has never been away from home for more than two weeks, a feeling that can be described (not at all dramatically) as the sensation of abandoning your belongings, throwing your life vest to the wind, and diving off a boat engulfed in flames into murky, shark-infested water.
This blog post serves as a landmark for where I was six months after college graduation. I have about the next two months until my parents tell me to quit soul-searching and get a real job. Until then, the world is my oyster. (Cringe.) Stay tuned.