Finding Freedom from the "Oughts"

For the past nine months, I've been struggling with my quarter-life crisis. I don't know where I'm supposed to be in life. Most of the people I know from high school have children, and those who aren't married or divorced are getting married (or divorced). I know people who are real adults--the kind of people who own a house with a yard and have started planning for retirement.

And me? I have a master's degree, more cats than is probably normal, and one year into what was supposed to be my career, I'm looking for a new job.

Last night I began thinking about how there are all these phases in life that we don’t consider except when we're living them. We picture, say, getting our first bicycle, or starting our first job, or a first kiss, graduations, weddings—in short, we picture what we imagine the exciting or significant parts of our lives will be. Books, and TV, and movies, and the stories of friends and family all tell us what all those parts are supposed to look like, so even if our expectations aren’t accurate, we have some notion of what they “ought” to be. And to some degree, we make decisions about life based on those "oughts" and how we reconcile the expectation with the actual.

But there’s all this in-between stuff, too, that gets really confusing. You know, the connective tissue between the big events. The mundane, every-day pieces of life that lead us from event to event and actually make up the majority of our lives, and tend to often be some of the most precious moments in retrospect. The times I spent riding my bike with friends are more significant memories than the moment I actually got my first bike; the day I quit my first job has shaped me more than the day I was hired; a few moments of genuine conversation and connectedness with a platonic male friend are more fondly remembered than my first kiss; and the struggles leading up to commencement are more vivid in my mind than anything that was said by any of the speakers who addressed me and my classmates.

What's funny about these connective moments is that we never expect them. They're the surprise gifts that life gives us. And because we don't anticipate them, because we have no expectations for them, they often surprise us in both good and bad ways.

And that’s where I am right now. We "know" what it looks like to be part of a family as a child, or to be in college, and we know what it looks like to be married--and by "know" I mean we have some expectation, be it realistic or not. We have some conception that we work toward making reality. But we don’t all know what it’s supposed to look like between college and family life. This is not the life phase that sitcoms favor, and there is no special section in the bookstore between Young Adult Fiction and (Established, Home-owning, 401(k)-investing Adult) Fiction. It's like up until this point we've been reading from a script, and suddenly that script has been revoked and we're asked to do improv. We know we have to get to the next scene in this play, but we're not sure how. Personally, I’ve been trying to rush through this phase because it’s unsettling. I've wanted to usher in my 30's with my 20's only half done. I don’t know what’s expected of me during this in-between. I worry I'll be in limbo for all eternity.

But maybe there’s some remarkable beauty in this uncertainty because I can decide for myself what this phase should look like, and I will know that whatever I make it, it’s mine. How many parts of life can we genuinely claim as original, completely free of the influence of those cultural narratives that so often inform our expectations? Granted, that freedom doesn’t make it any easier; it's exactly what makes this life phase so frightening.

I remember talking to a good friend during our second semester of grad school. I’d been sort of seeing this guy, but felt insecure about it for numerous reasons. She and I were talking about it one night and she asked why I was so scared about it, and finally I replied that I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. I replied that I had always been single and didn’t know what I was like in a relationship, or what it should feel like or be like. Again, I felt like I was missing the script. My friend’s reply was typical of her wisdom—it should be whatever I wanted it to be.

Maybe more in life is like that than we think. Yet it's so much harder to give form to something when we have no preconceived idea of what it should be. Imagine buying a piece of furniture that you have to assemble, but not receiving instructions or an image on the box. You have a set number of pieces, and they can only be assembled in a finite number of ways, yet you still have greater freedom than if you had the directions. Granted, that freedom may lead to your failure to make anything useful. But it might also lead to a better piece of furniture than was originally intended. In reality, you'd probably wind up making something very simple and very similar to what most other people would make. However, based on the life experiences I have already had, I know that regardless what I make with the furniture pieces in my box, I will be prouder to have made something of my own than I would be of making the most beautiful, functional, cookie-cutter table imaginable.

So let's see what we can become when we loose ourselves from the fear imposed by "supposed" and "ought." Here's to throwing out the directions.