An important to thing to note, in this series, is that my education path has the following progression: I completed K-12, moved to a four-year public university and graduated in four years, and then I completed a two-year graduate program. Regardless of your educational path, however, there comes a point when you realize you’ve run out of script. For me, the first hints of this came when I decided to go to graduate school in lieu of the workforce. After graduate school, upon entering my first job, I realized the script was mine to write.

It sounds simple, but the twenties generally bring about the first time in your life when all the realities of your life – your place of work, the city/town you inhabit, the people you surround yourself with, the vehicle you drive (if you drive), – become yours to choose.

There are more mundane choices, too. In July 0f 2014, I found myself choosing a retirement plan, an insurance option, whether or not to opt into vision insurance, a local dentist and physician, whether or not to sign with a gym, which vacation days to utilize… Where did all this freedom come from?

For me, the ‘running out of script’ feeling has been real. Holding the pen to author your life is, at first, a terrifying prospect. What if we make the wrong decision? Will I be glad, when I look back on my twenties, that I spent them doing this? Living here? What really matters? How am I living with the answer to that question in mind?

Here it is: After all the schooling, the training, and the dreaming, your twenties hand you the pen with which to write your life. It’s a liberating experience, yes, but it’s also a bit harrowing. But we can do it, because we’re doing it. We’re gonna make it, twenty-somethings. We’re gonna write this story.

“Wait, Michael,” you might be saying, “Maybe this is more of a you thing that you’re projecting as a universal truth so that you can deal with the fact that you annoy your co-workers.” I hear you, and I’ll own that it’s a possibility, but hear me out.

The twenties, for most, mark a time of entering the workforce and beginning a career. Fresh off of whatever schooling was mandated, the twenty-something taking their first position is often ambitious, driven, and eager to prove that they were worth the hire. Having grown up with workplace sitcoms, we twenty-somethings approach our first jobs with hopes of making friends and doing good things.

Here’s the reality: You are somebody’s colleague nightmare. Maybe you come to work with a smile and a cup of coffee each day, but your cubicle-mate notices you don’t ever arrive quite on time. Maybe you are dependable and reliable, answering every e-mail with lightning precision and creating workplace efficiency flow like none other, but your project manager notes you’re harmful for team morale. Maybe you are passionate and contribute solid ideas, but the three people sitting behind you in that meeting think you like to hear yourself speak. Maybe you’re a team player who creates waves with nobody, but somebody on your task force thinks you’re a schmoozer with very little vision. Your co-workers are going to find your ‘but.’ 

The reality is that the process of teamwork and cooperation is, and always has been, a pretty challenging undertaking. Because the twenty-something years typically mark the introduction to a workplace setting, they are also the years we are figuring out our identity as an employee. It may be tough to hear, but there is a ‘but’ about your approach to work.

There are two keys, I think, to moving forward with this information: (1) Own the feedback, but (2) don’t dim your shine.

Own the feedback. It’s important to be self-reflective and to understand that you probably wouldn’t mind what your co-workers are telling you (or each other) if there wasn’t some truth to it. Your weaknesses will not be erased, and hiding them is temporary at best, so it seems helpful to acknowledge them, to work against them when possible, and to apologize for them when necessary.

Don’t dim your shine. Sometimes there is an additional ‘but,’ that sounds more like this: ‘But I’m only picking at that because you’re such a good problem-solver that it makes me feel insecure.’ ‘But I wish I could network like that; it doesn’t come naturally to me.’ ‘But I don’t know how to put people at ease like that.’ ‘But you always seem to know what you’re doing, and it makes me unsure.’ You can’t take all the feedback, or you’ll always be in evaluation mode and you won’t get anything done. Trust your brand. Accept that it’s going to annoy somebody.

I made it 25 years into my life without ever being too much of a mess. I grew up approaching life a little bit like crossing rocks in a river: careful, tentative steps and eyes on the horizon for hazards. It was exactly this tendency, during my emergence into young adulthood, that landed me in occasional hot water with friends and family: You think you’re perfect. You always do the right thing. I don’t want to disappoint you. It was isolating, occasionally, but I shrugged it off. I was there to help people through their mess, which was easy, as I had very little.

My first foray into messy, ambiguous territory came when I realized I was gay. The coming out process is unique to every LGBT+ person, but it’s generally a universally big mess to manage. There are a lot of people to tell, many of whom are going to make it about themselves, and it might involve a few chips to the support system. The act of declaring oneself, of professing one’s very heart, should not involve the concept of ‘damage control,’ but it often does.

Despite the messiness, however, I moved forward with insistent commitment to my life strategy: Plan it out, bring it to life, help everybody put the pieces together, group hug, and hope for the best. And not everything was perfect. Things were hard, the mess was a bit out of my purview, and my support system took a few hits. But I kept my shit together.

At 25, I failed at my relationship and struggled to find the ground. I struggled to eat, avoided my bed for the better part of a month, and I got really into Taylor Swift. After 25 years of ‘having it together’ and ‘having a plan’ so that everybody else could feel calm, I was a hot. damn. mess. And, in that process, I had to rely on my friends for support and trust them to love me anyway. It was hard, being truly vulnerable, and I missed the feeling of being the shoulder rather than needing it, but I found myself in that process. I found the broken pieces inside of me and figured out that they didn’t erase my worthiness.

I bring this up because the twenty-somethings are going to come along with some mess: We are emerging adults making our way into the world, and we are – at best – trying to ‘fake it until we make it.’ Nobody’s immune from the breaks, from the mess, from the failures.

The key is, I think, to help each other through. I’ve learned to put my judgment to rest, to hear my friends and family out as they share about their latest mistakes. I’m going to need them to love me through mine, so I’ll love them through theirs, and not in any kind of distant, holier-than-thou way. Nobody’s immune from the mess, twenty-somethings. We’re all still learning to walk on our own.

In May of 2012, I graduated from college with the best of friends. Commencement week was a blur of celebrations and nostalgia, toasts to the world we built here together, and a mess of excitement and apprehension about the big What’s Next. We lived off of microwave S’mores, Diet Coke and Jim Beam, and an appalling lack of sleep. Hugging one another, whispering goodbyes, we embarked from college and into our true twenties.

It’s been four years, almost, since that time. It feels like yesterday. Those four years have brought us all our own adventures – for me, graduate school and my first professional job. For all of us, broken plans and new dreams, struggles with life and love and the pursuit of happiness. I am very nearly 27, and I have to ask: How in the world did this happen?

Even now, when I think about the four years that were my high school experience, I remember time moving along with a gentle, reassuring thrum of predictability. Days dragged, months dragged further, and the journey to that diploma felt hard-won.

College was a journey in its own right. Embarking from home, discovering the giants in the sky, figuring out who I was. I remember it went faster than I expected, but it felt manageable. They were four epic years (it was cool to say things were ‘epic’ then), and we had ‘done college right.’

But I never did quite get my feet to the rhythm of the past four years. Grad school ripped by underfoot at a breakneck pace, and it feels like I started this job – this new adventure – mere weeks ago.

A secret to the twenty-something years: Life picks up. The train starts ripping forward, and it pays no mind to the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing. Facebook friends begin families, nostalgia channels start playing the shows we grew up to, and memories of our good college years start to sound like our parents’ stories.

“‘Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.’ – Yo-Yo Mama

“I’m very passionate about helping people, my significant other, and Batman (maybe not in that order). I’m in love with the  process of improving at yoga, the ideals of self-improvement, and being a mentor to those that will have me. I can rave about thing things I love for days and days; I’m frenzied about the process of gaining more understanding of those things that light my soul on fire. My passion is my flow. I feel beautiful when I’m engaging in the things I’m obsessed with. Passion is one of the two primary emotions that makes me tick.

“‘Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.’ – Elizabeth Edwards

“Some days passion isn’t there. I wish it always was. I can’t lust after progress every day, even if it involves something I’m always in love with. I’m only human, and humans at their most basic are still complicated. Some days my soul isn’t on fire, and I don’t feel beautiful. Those are the days my energy comes from a fuel that every spirited person should have in reserves: Resilience.

–

“I grind until the day is over. The passion always comes back, but not if I stop moving. Learning about how we as humans hurt each other, arguing with my significant other, watching Batman & Robin. These aren’t things I crave to do every day. My yoga practice will regress, some days I don’t improve, and there are times I don’t have the energy to give to a mentee. I can’t will myself to be to be lustful of the process.. I can be resilient, show up, and still do the work that leads to things I’m passionate about. I always remember in times of need that Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy wouldn’t exist without the worst moments of the 90’s Batman movies. My weakest moments in my relationship create the strongest long-term bonds. Sacrifices must be made to capture the queen on a chessboard. My base emotions can be pawns to a greater cause.

“Resilience is the peanut butter, passion is the jelly, my body is the bread. Resilience holds everything together, passion makes everything sweet and textured, and without my body none of the emotions matter. It all makes for one delicious sandwich, but one component without the others isn’t worth eating. In a world filled so many great sandwiches, eating a shitty sandwich is a great sacrifice.

“Stay passionate. Stay resilient. Keep making a difference.”

– T

A friend of mine once told me, after reading a piece I’d written, that it wasn’t my best work. It might’ve been cathartic, she told me, but it was detached. Unemotional. ‘Your best work,’ she told me, ‘is somewhere between hilarious and heartbreaking.’

The same friend, somebody who has always seen into me a bit more than most people do, recommended that I read Everything Matters!

Continue reading “book club: ‘everything matters!’” →

A little over a week ago, I was in my car listening to a new playlist, and one of them – ‘Hold Each Other’ by A Great Big World – caught my attention about halfway through. The singer, it seemed, was singing about love – and he was using male pronouns. Pressing the track back a bit, I listened more closely:

Everything looks different now
All this time my head was down
He came along and showed me how to let go
I can’t remember where I’m from
All I know is who I’ve become
That our love has just begun like ohhh

Something happens when I hold him
He keeps my heart from getting broken
When the days get short and the nights get a little bit frozen
We hold each other, we hold each other
Continue reading “a song for us.” →

First, let me tell you: This semester, a colleague (Dani) and I have been #blessed with the opportunity to create and instruct an Honors colloquium course through the Ball State Honors College. It’s a bit of a unique gem to the Honors curriculum, but the ‘colloquium’ is essentially a class designed around a topic chosen by the instructor(s), and it should get students thinking and discussing critically. Following the passions we shared, Dani and I constructed a course called The Right to Exist: Social Justice Journeys 2001 to Today.

Continue reading “and i slay.” →

About once every couple of months, I devote the better portion of a morning to building a new playlist. The entire process – scouring the Spotify world for new gems, trying to build the soundtrack to life as is, working to encapsulate it all with the right title – takes a fair amount of time and invigorates me for the days ahead. Not all playlists are created equal, however, as evidenced by the dusty ones at the bottom of the list.

Continue reading “the art of building a playlist.” →

I’ve written before about running as it relates to my weight loss journey, about the first time I stepped onto a treadmill and forced myself through a song. I’ve written about the gradual increase in my running competence, from four minutes on a treadmill to the completion of half-marathons. But, as I realized earlier this week as I was running around the recreation center track, I haven’t truly written out what running does for me.

Habitual runners can agree: Running is (mostly) free therapy. Prior to a run, I often find myself cranky, aimless, and bored; following one, I am usually spirited, motivated, and enthused. Running has helped me sort out more than a few knots, as it enables my mind to wander and reflect at length. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Somewhere along the chronology of my life – maybe in the early, awkward middle school years – I stopped feeling ‘at home’ in my body. As I gained weight, ever self-conscious of the rising number on the scale, I began to feel a strange dissonance between the person I was and the person I saw in the mirror. Growing taller, broader, wider, I found myself feeling clumsy and a bit confused.

Beginning at the end of my high school tenure and moving through my undergraduate years, my weight loss journey enabled me to gain some authorship over the state of my body. I came to understand the transactional nature of exercise, of taking time to strengthen and work my body. Grad school marked a bit of a decline for this time, and then moving into the workforce provided me the opportunity to find this authorship again.

When I run today, I am often amazed at how quickly I am compelled to feel ‘at home’ in my body. Running requires that I pay attention to the mechanics of my feet, my ankles. That I notice the sturdiness of my legs, the muscular cut of my calves. That I hold my shoulders in a position both relaxed and upright, keep my stomach and arms engaged. On my best runs, sometimes under summer night skies and others through monotonous laps in the gym, I find myself rolling my head back and forth, spreading my arms like wings to accept the moment. Before and after each run, I stretch, feeling my muscles respond.

I am alive in this body, running reminds me again and again. This body is mine, and I must treat it well, appreciate its strengths, respect its limitations.

What running does for me, I have come to understand, is to bring me back in communion with the body I sometimes forget is my home. It connects me to myself; it breathes life into the vessel.