Everything, Everything was an Amazon recommendation. I’m not sure, actually, what I purchased to bring about the suggestion, but the cover art drew me in, and the synopsis seemed promising. I did what we’ve been told not to do – I judged a book by its cover – and I added it to my Amazon cart.

Continue reading “book club: ‘everything, everything’.” →

“As a girl, I shunned everything I was supposed to like. I had no time for pink, for dolls, or for makeup. I was busy wading through creek waters searching for frogs or playing catch with my dad. According to my gay friends, this is the earliest and clearest sign of knowing. Maybe they’re right, but I’ve got another one.

“When I was seventeen, I used a fake ID to get into a townie bar with a boy. It was open mic night, and a girl with long limbs and a shy smile took the stage. As she strummed guitar strings, she sung a Sara Bareilles song, and I felt something stirring inside my chest. Afterwards, I talked to her at the bar, and she agreed to hang out.

“She liked pink. When I told her I didn’t, she argued with me. She promised to show me the importance of pink. As I fell for her, I fell for the way she saw the world. I think that’s my ‘when-I-knew.’ I think it’s the day a girl stopped me in my tracks and convinced me to look at all the things nobody else could.“

– S.

We’re all dreamers, to an extent. It is perhaps the tendency to dream – to look beyond what is and to build a vision of what could be – that most separates humankind from the other animals. As we move into our twenties, departing our childhoods and undergoing the orientation to long-awaited ‘real world,’ we often find ourselves pushed toward pragmatism and efficiency.

In your mid-twenties, provided you’re lucky enough to find employment, you’ll probably have colleagues ranging across a few phases of life, and you’re likely to sit in the same meetings, engage in the same work culture, and dissect the same day-to-day happenings. If you come in dreaming wildly, it’s more than likely you’ll hear it: I remember when I used to say things like that. More often than not, the tone is acidic; you are being ridiculed.

But, take every person in that office, and look at their inner world, and you’ll find a long history of dreams: Air guitar solos in teenage bedrooms, daydreams of being met by a roar of applause, imagined adventures in exotic settings, love that robbed them of sleep and they didn’t mind it one bit. The snidest, most rigid co-worker you know has dreamt like this. It is the human condition.

I think it’s true that dreams, when set aside, nag at us. They pull at our heartstrings, our streams of thought, perhaps chiding us not to forget our calling. And, when we’re opting to ignore them, they sour our perspectives a bit. Dreams are for fools, we tell ourselves, relieved to have found a means of justifying our choices. Soon, if we don’t watch for it, we are the ones telling dreamers, I remember when I used to say things like that.

But, at least for the true dreamers among us, dreams are worth defending. Part of growing up, of moving through the twenties, is to learn how to channel dreams well. We are in our years of doing, and there are a lot of commitments competing for our time, but we must not shelve the things that matter most to us.

Here’s what I know: In a room of people, the dreamers will find the other dreamers. They will build one another up, they will whisper to one another messages of belief, and they will light the way for one another. Don’t mind the pebbles; follow your magic and fly.

A little over a year ago, following the announcement that the Supreme Court had ruled bans on same-sex marriages unconstitutional, I felt myself emboldened enough to publish a blog post in which I professed myself gay to my social media network. The act, inspired by a moment of reluctance to accept the rainbow profile picture filter, took a bit of wild courage, but it was a wildly liberating and important step.

Almost instantly, the post gathered a social media response. Kind messages, likes, and private messages ranging from support to challenge, all intended out of love. What I hadn’t expected, however, were the moments of outreach from people facing their own struggle. How’d you do it? some asked, How’d you say it in front of everybody?

I learned, from that experience, the power of sharing our stories. When we speak to the struggles we’ve faced, we light the way for others to know they aren’t alone in theirs, and possibly open ourselves up to connect and help one another through.

Here’s another thing I know: We twenty-somethings all have a story. Everybody has a struggle they’re carrying around, and – no matter how much anybody pretends to ‘have it together’ – we’re all trying to figure it out. Like I said in entry 2, nobody’s immune from the mess.

Empathy reconnects us, and it invigorates us to rejoin the climb of life. Whenever I’ve felt like a mess, I’ve had friends who’ve shared recent struggles, and the knowledge that I haven’t been alone in my confusion has lit the path. Somebody out there needs your story, twenty-somethings, so speak up.

“I don’t know where to start. I guess it’s worth saying that I’ve always known, in some way or another. When I was younger, my choices leaned toward the feminine: I liked pink cars, female video game characters, and imagining I was Kimberly from The Power Rangers. I settled into my maleness after my father broke down at Walmart over the Barbie doll I had begged him to buy me. When we got in the car, he asked me what he did wrong. I was nine.

“When I was fourteen, I was awkward and shy, but I helped with the stage crew after school. One day I stayed after and found out there was no practice, but it was too late to catch the bus. I hung out in the hallway, reading a book, and this guy from my grade finished up with basketball practice. He sat down next to me and joked with me. He told me we should meet more often.

“So we did. After the Autumn showcase, I neglected to tell my mom there was no more play practice. Each week, we met and we talked. One day, he said he wanted to show me something, and he walked me back to a locker room. It sounds like something out of porn, but it was sweet. He kissed me like people kiss each other in movies. It lasted for maybe ten minutes, and then we thought we heard a noise, and we got out of there.

“He was the first boy I loved. He’s married now, to a woman. She seems happy, and so does he. I would like to believe he loved me too, though. I’m just glad it happened. Whether he knows it or not, he showed me that there isn’t anything about me I need to run from.“

– D.

I remember, at fifteen, the night our Driver’s Ed instructor stood at the front of the class and begged us to take a good, hard look at the ‘invincibility complex’ of the teenage years. Driving recklessly is a fatal act, I’m sure she was trying to say, even for those of us facing seemingly infinite futures.

It is perhaps because the twenties follow the teens that I say this, but the impermanence of everything has never been more evident to me than in my twenty-something years. Maybe, as we make a break with these notions of immortality, we must also begin to accept the realities of impermanence. We are fragile, and time is fleeting. Here’s what awaits you in our twenties, my friends:

The friends you went to high school with? They’re going to move, start families, begin careers, and become different people (if they haven’t already). You’ll still ‘like’ some of their stuff on social media, but the gulf between your worlds will remain.

The holiday meal you always spend with your Dad’s side of the family? That’s getting cumbersome, with generations of people squeezing past one another in a house, and it’s only a matter of time until your parents and aunts and uncles look at each knowingly, nodding in agreement that ‘this is the last one.’

Your favorite local pizza place? Ol’ Joe is looking to retire and move to sunny Boca, so it’s going to be renovated into a Quizno’s, which – despite making steam emerge from your ears – will please the youths. (Do the youths still like Quizno’s?)

As your twenties pick up, as you exit school and enter your first and second jobs, you’ll likely change scenery and the cast of characters in your life will evolve. There may be a few constants, but most of your friends’ lives were meant to intertwine with your own for just a moment. Life keeps moving, pushing, changing the world around you.

And that’s what we learn: Nothing is forever, least of all us. We are here for an unspecified and unguaranteed amount of time, and all the dreams we concocted in our invincible years start to look a bit like hourglasses. Which ones matter? Follow those, but don’t hustle too hard: You won’t get the world, as it is, for very much longer.

One night, in hopes of burning some time before a movie, my friend Chris and I traveled to the wondrous world of Target. Equipped with a peculiar blend of purposelessness and adventure, we wandered the supermarket with open eyes. What do you have to offer? we asked the shelves.

It was then that my friend found, and suggested I read, Tell the Wolves I’m Home.

Continue reading “book club: ‘tell the wolves i’m home’.” →

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.