I’m a Big Kid Now

You know when you’re at an intersection, and you want to turn left, but another car is approaching? And you maybe misjudge the speed of the other car a little bit, so you decide to go for it, but midway through your turn you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake? When this happens to me, I like to accelerate very slightly– not enough to make a difference– open my eyes very widely, and scream for the entire duration of the turn.

This is similar to the way in which I am approaching adulthood.

I bought a suit this summer and felt very serious and very business-y. I’m in the business school so I pretty much spend all of my time reminding people how serious I am and how much easier my coursework is than that of the engineering students. It’s very strenuous. Still, I have butt-length blonde hair and my resume has a headshot. It also has my name in bold lilac letters and lists me as the recipient of the “America Needs Cheerleaders” award. Secret: it’s the resume I created for sorority rush. Yikes.

Simultaneously, I am learning to cook. I don’t have any good or original jokes for this topic but it kind of goes with the “becoming an adult theme” so I thought I would through it out there. Eh.

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I always thought from childhood that I would grow up to be a writer. I love to write, and as good as I am, I’m much, much faster. I am the Usain Bolt of paragraphs, if Usain Bolt sometimes decided that he hated the race he had been running and turned around. Also if Usain Bolt wouldn’t let anyone watch him run. I’m a very neurotic sprinter is what I’m trying to say. I almost never edit anything, but I often throw things away or let them languish in my drafts until I find them very, very embarrassing. If you’re reading something I wrote, I wrote it in a near manic state of productivity and then pushed publish. This is basically stream-of-consciousness, which is why I sometimes sound like a politician or a serial killer eulogizing someone before they die.

This all adds up to not being particularly employable as a writer. For a while, I thought about becoming a columnist, but imagine if my boss was trying to criticize me. Megan, people can’t relate to your column. Your jokes are very weird. You need to adopt a self-reflective style. You need to let me read your stuff before you just let it go to print, he says. I imagine myself as the writer of the one actual column with words in Cosmo in this scenario. But this is who I ammmmm, I whine, I’m not changing it because they don’t get it. I’ll lose and stay myself. I’ll starve and stay myself. And that’s how I become homeless. I probably also throw myself on the ground dramatically and get stepped on by several leopard/ hot pink stilettos.

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I have always prided myself upon being a very chill girl; I rarely care about anything. However, the things I care about, I am totally insane about. I am crazy like a fox. I swing from confident and productive to a  depressive bleeding heart. It’s totally unpredictable. When I am uninspired, my work gets very patriotic– it’s apparently a subconscious fallback. If I could, I would write full time, developing the kind of toxic relationship with my own thoughts that couples who work from home sometimes adopt. I care deeply– obsessively– about the integrity of my work, which is why I write 90% awkward jokes, 10% complaints. That’s a body of work with integrity, I think, apparently. There is so little originality left to be said, in some ways I think I am grasping, desperately, violently, to say something shocking or novel before it is all used up. It is an insecurity of sorts that manifests rarely but viciously in my life. I’m working on controlling it. We all have something little and dark within us (oh God that’s cliche) through and to we push ourselves. Adulthood is how you bump into your own ugliness and also the amount of anxiety you get when you have to talk on the phone.

In haste, but with intention this time,

Megan