You Can't Be In Love

                I sat in the back of Dawn Deweese’s (I’m sure she’d feel more revered if I called her Ms. Deweese, as I did with all my high school teachers, that is, until I graduated and then took the liberty of calling them all by their first names, whether they approved or not) class as she drew a pyramid on the board—I had already had numerous health classes throughout grade school; I was not about to relearn the food groups.  The class was titled “Effective Skills,” and it was a required course for all freshmen.  With a name like that, you would think lessons would consist of Tiring Changing 101 and How To Land A Job Even If You’re Not Qualified.  But at an all-girl, Catholic school, effective skills meant something deeper than abilities plugged into a formula only to be applied into physical trade skills.  Effective skills meant facing the part of life that is often the hardest to understand and maintain: you.

                The pyramid consisted of 5 layers, from the bottom up; physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—these were the needs for the ultimate human condition.  I tugged at the sleeves of my gray, wool sweater and fidgeted with the hem of my maroon and white plaid skirt.  This is stupid, I thought, I have everything I need.  Why do I have to take a class that tells what I need? Who the hell does Abraham Maslow think he is, just butting into my life and telling me how to be human?   We were asked to draw a pyramid, and assess where we believed to be.  Of course, as an overconfident, headstrong 14 year old girl who was scared away by any sort of introspection, without even thinking, I circled the pinnacle of the pyramid with my Electric Lime marker (at an all-girl high school, the majority of work is done in bold, neon colors.  Or bubble letters).  Now, as an overconfident, headstrong 22 year old who fondly uses a little bit of navel-gazing to confront the question, what the fuck were you thinking?, in retrospect, this may have been the class that I needed the most—you know, that saying, “blessing in disguise.”  But I wouldn’t realize it until much later.

Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.

                In Catholic school teaching, I’m almost positive the ‘sex’ part was left out of this bottom rung (I would learn all about abstinence and the Catholic doctrine surrounding sex during my sophomore year in Catholic Moral Teaching—another required course).

                I always knew I was lucky when it came to physiological needs.  I feel like anyone who has parents who can scrape up the funds to not only send one, but three girls to private school from K-12 has all of their needs pretty much met.  My parents worked their asses off to make sure their children could be educated in Catholic schools, because that’s how they wanted us to be raised, regardless of if it was monetarily feasible.  Some nights, my mother wouldn’t get home until 9pm, because she’d be busy building her new business where she’d eventually become COO, and my dad was left to fend for himself. One of my earliest memories is crying in the bathtub when I was about 4, because my mom wasn’t home in time to give me my bath, which she always did before I went to bed.  My dad tried his best, as he spoke in a falsetto to make me laugh and imitate my mom as he took over her nightly duties.  He was a shoddy replacement, but hey, what can a guy do?  I always had food on the table; mainly due to my mom’s badass cooking skills, which I have yet to obtain (and probably won’t), and I always had homeostasis by way of the correct balance of mother and father figure constantly shaping who I became.  Come October, my parents will celebrate their 35^th wedding anniversary, and I realize how lucky I am to say that my parents are still together, despite the times my dad tells my mom she needs to chill out and despite the times my mom calls my dad a dickhead for being insensitive (I’m almost positive she got that word from me, but I don’t want to take too much credit).

Safety: body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, property

                I ran around the cul-de-sac barefoot until my dad flipped on the porch light.  Apart from a few scrapes, a rusty nail to the foot followed by a trip to the immediate care center for a tetanus shot, and some calluses that will forever haunt me and anyone who will ever give me a pedicure, I never doubted that I was safe.  I’m sure my parents would’ve loved to have kept me outside all night, and I’m sure I could have entertained myself (I suffered from youngest child syndrome; my sisters wouldn’t hang out with me, so I frequently resorted to talking to myself or inanimate objects—something that I openly admit has been carried into my adult life as well), but I had a place to call home at the end of the night, despite my protests of, “oh, come on, just ONE MORE kickball game!”  I knew that I was safe. And my family was safe. And that all of my prized possessions, like the Bonne Bell chapstick collection I kept in the top drawer of my nightstand and the trunk of Polly Pockets in the basement, were safe.  I got a few wallops to the ass over the years that were most likely deserved, a broken wrist which was inflicted by my own stupidity and amateur ability to ride an ATV, and went through a tonsillectomy like a champ after missing 16 days of kindergarten due to strep throat, but nothing ever threatened my physical security (unless you count the fist fight that I almost got into at a Red Hot Chili Pepper’s concert, but that’s another story for another time).

Love: friendship, love, family, affection, belonging

                The first time I said, “I love you,” to someone other than my mom or dad or immediate family members and friends, I was 15 years old.

                I’ll pause for a minute and let you laugh.  Don’t worry, I’d do the same thing if I just read something like that.

                If I take a minute to look back on who I was when I was 15 years old, it brings me to one of those, what the fuck were you thinking? moments.  This is where my pyramid would start to fall apart eventually, despite my lime green indicator that I had made it to the top.  Fifteen.  There is nothing stable about a 15 year-old.  You get pissed off if your parents buy the wrong cereal, and then when they go back to return the Cocoa Pebbles and get Cocoa Puffs like you had asked, you decide that cereal isn’t your thing anymore and you want only hormone-free eggs for breakfast, because you’re trying this new eat-everything-natural-because-that-girl-with-the-henna-tattoo-in-your-English-class-seems-cool-and-she-does-it diet.  Fifteen is an age for transparency and vapidity and changing who you are every time the wind picks up.  How can you love someone if you don’t even know who you are?

                When I first dropped the L bomb, I was convinced that I meant it.  And every single time that followed.  To fix a fight.  I love you.  To end the night.  I love you.  Just to fill the air with words. I love you.  But the sad part was, I couldn’t even look at myself and say I love you, because I was so wrapped up in trying to be and not just being.  I felt the need to change myself to make someone fall in love with me, constantly morphing in order to get a response.  I wanted love, and goddamnit, I would have it, even if I had to blindfold it, wrap it in burlap and stuff it in my trunk.  With juvenile love rooted in whether or not he called when he said he would, checking to see who he’s talking to on AIM (I’m telling y’all, it was back in those days; I was THAT young and idiotic), and starting fights as tests just to see if he really cared and wanted to fight for the relationship, I kept digging a hole and attempting to fill it back up with I love yous.

                My friends fucking hated me.  And accused me of “not being myself,” whatever the hell that meant, because who were they to tell me who “myself,” was, right?  In all honesty, I had no idea who to tell myself to be, either.  Depending on the day of the week, I’d pick something new.  Some days I liked who I was, and some days I didn’t, and most of the time, it was based on whether or not he liked who I was that day.  Like marking a fucking calendar every day; he loves me, he loves me not.  It was my own fault, though.  I can’t put blame on other people that I was too stubborn to be patient and let myself naturally develop into who I am. I wanted to waste my I love yous on someone else instead of me.

Esteem: confidence, self-esteem, achievements, respect of/by others

                It took a while to figure out who I was.  And it didn’t happen all at once.  I didn’t just wake up and think, huh, alright, cool, I’m finally me.  Even though I’d like to wake up to that every morning (and maybe some pancakes along with it), it’s a process, which I didn’t realize until recently.  As inconvenient as it sounds, I think it may have been helpful to hate myself before learning to love myself.  Hate may be a strong word.  Let’s just say, if I met me and spent an afternoon with myself, I would’ve thought, this girl is off her meds.  What I slowly started to put together was that you can’t be in love unless you’re in love with yourself first.  And in love with your life and all that entails.  How can someone possibly give herself to someone else if she hasn’t even been received by herself (there’s some sort of really awful sex pun in there, but just go with it, you know what I mean)? It’s hard to grasp that I only get to be me once.  And do I want to die as the crotchety ol’ bitch who never liked herself or anyone else except her animals and the hanging plants inside her patio home in Arizona?  Fuck. That.  Every day I like myself a little bit more (except when I have hangovers or am on my period. Hey, I’m only human), and if I keep confidence and respect in myself, others will put it in me as well (okay, another really bad sex pun, sorry, I’m not trying to make this saucy, it’s just happening).

Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

                I don’t mean to dwell on the past, and I don’t mean to call anyone out.  Which I’m sure I’ve done and will never hear the end of it.  I only do this to document a passage that most people have to go through before they figure all this life shit out.  I’m currently approaching the final level of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and you know, maybe he does know a little something about what I need.  It’s not easy for me to admit this, but I was wrong.  That may be the only time you see me type that.  Ever.  But I’ve accepted everything I am at this point.  All the good and bad and weird and ridiculous and quirky and disgusting and endearing.  And I don’t have the time to waste not loving every bit of it.       

                If I could go back in time, I would yank that Electric Lime marker out of my hand and place it back into my glittery purple Spacemaker.  I would grab myself by the shoulders and have no qualms with shaking the shit out of 14 year-old me.  I would also tell myself to not date anyone until I’m at least 20, because everyone until then are poor excuses for anything resembling “boyfriend material,” so don’t waste an ounce of love that I could spend on myself.  I would assure myself that I grow up to be fine—even a little badass—and not to fuck it up.  But most importantly, I would pull out that Electric Lime marker again and in huge bubble letters across the front of my planner (which was covered with pictures of Gerard Way; it was a really weird phase for me, I prefer not to answer any questions about it), I would write,

YOU CAN’T BE IN LOVE UNLESS YOU LOVE YOURSELF FIRST.

               

A (really) scattered note on friends

          In 1996, I sat across from Madison Daub in Ms. Ritchie’s morning kindergarten class.  My mom had ironed my brown and white plaid jumper that morning, just as she did for my sisters each year on the first day of school.  I had my new Esmeralda backpack (The Hunchback of Notre Dame had come out that summer, and I became morbidly obsessed with being a gypsy; I made numerous tambourines with bags of beans and two paper plates taped together, and tied scarves around my waist as I shimmied to the dinner table) and a pack of fresh Crayolas—the 64 pack, because 12 and 24 were for chumps.  As the end of the first day of class neared, I reflected deeply on the past 3 and a half hours spent coloring my nametag, filling out my home information (I had trouble with my Es and 3s, so thank god they’re on the same phone key, and as for my name, well, J3ssica would do for now) and awkwardly making my first impression on kids I would spend the next 9 years with.  We were about to line up at the door when I looked at Madison, who I hadn’t said a word to all day, but because of proximity, I felt it was only logical to ask; “will you be my best friend?”

------

I’ve been through a few best friends since Madison Daub, and I’ve learned that while I would love for the words, “will you be my best friend,” to be a binding contract to ensure that each party perform all duties and responsibilities of a best friend, and all those failing to adhere to the Rule Book of Best Friends would be smote by the Friend Gods and put on a probationary period wherein they cannot pursue any new friendships and can definitely not be included on any trips to get coffee and/or froyo, the process is a bit more complicated.

I have always had a theory about friends:

“Can you do me a favor?”

I like to consider myself the queen of can-you-do-me-a-favor.  I should probably have a weekly quota.  I always find myself forgetting something or waiting until the last minute, which usually means waiting until it’s too late, in my case.  It’s something I’ve tried working on, but now I’ve just accepted it as an annoying quirk that I try to play off as endearing (I’ve learned this can work if I usually include a smiley face after everything I say).  

I typically gauge the seriousness of my friendships based on that question.  The friends that answer, “what do you need? I’ll see what I can do,” may be worth it.  But the friends who answer, “yeah, girl.  Wait—do I have to put pants on?” are the ones you cling to.

It seems like an idiotic way to evaluate the company you surround yourself with, but let me explain:  the deepest friendships are those punctuated with the mutual and unadulterated desire to give, no matter the circumstances—even if they are unknown.  And through the years that I’ve been socially cognizant, I’ve had to learn the hard way that these type of friends don’t come easily.  But I’ve also stumbled upon a handful of people who would drop everything and put on pants if I’m ever in need.  No romantic relationship could ever put a dent in the solid friendships I have now, and I’ll be the first to say, I’m down to ride ‘til I die for my bad bitches.

------

                This may seem like unsolicited advice, but I’ve been doing some soul-searching lately (that’s what people call it, right? Soul-searching? When you find out all this deep stuff about yourself that only surfaces during a transitional or traumatic period, oh, like say, I don’t know, uprooting your life and moving 16 hours away from your family and establishing yourself in a new city where you’ll be living alone and drowning in student loans), and I’ve come to understand that I would fight for friendships like the ones I have, and this is why:

Honesty. Every relationship needs it.  Whether it’s brutal honesty, or fessing up to something you’ve done, mutual honesty is a must.  You don’t like this new guy your girl starts seeing? Tell her.   If your girl has food in her teeth, pick it out.  Offer some floss.  That’s what friends are for.  Maybe white isn’t her color.  Don’t you dare let her go out looking like a polar bear.  Friends talk openly about EVERYTHING.  Be there to revel in the fact that you are sharing the most visceral part of life with someone: the honest goddamn truth.

Reliability.  Friends are there in a time of need.  They drive in from an hour away to bring you wine and good company when some asshole breaks your heart.  They pick you up when your piece of shit car breaks down and you’re left cursing on the shoulder of I-65.  You tell a friend you’ll be there for her big show? You show up 20 minutes early and sit in the front row.  With a bouquet of fucking flowers.  That’s a badass friend.

Camaraderie.  You just like being around each other.  You could be sitting at a crowded bar or miserably sweating your asses off at the gym at that spin class you both regret signing up for or sharing a blanket and Ben & Jerry’s while you cry over every Ryan Reynolds movie ever made, and it’s still the highlight of your week.  Phone calls turn into hour-long gossip sessions wherein you discuss everything from how much you hate your job to how much you love your new Michael Kors bag that you worked overtime at that god-awful job to scrounge up the funds for.

Give and take.  A friendship is an exchange, not a transaction. It’s not one-sided, and most of the time, it’s selfless.  The constant need to keep giving, not asking anything in return, but knowing damn well that your back is covered.  Listening and offering advice.  Knowing when to talk and when to shut up (believe me, this one has been hard for me to master).  It’s sending stupid cards for no reason, and unsolicitedly complimenting her new profile picture that makes her boobs look like they could rival ScarJo’s and liking all of her Instagrams, even if every single one is of her on the toilet or of her dog (whoops….).

Shameless tomfoolery.  You know you’ve found good friends when you can’t keep yourself out of trouble.  Like crashing a college party at a bar that clearly you were not invited to, or lying about your birthday to get free drinks.  Fulfilling friendships are thrilling, because there’s a level of trust in knowing that if you fuck up, you’re never alone.  You’re in this shit together, so you may as well live it up.

Compassion and understanding.  You feel what your friends feel.  Excitement for a new job or a raise.  Cautious and protective when pursuing a new relationship.  Sadness when things don’t work out the way we wanted them to.  You cry with them and laugh with them, and say the same thing at the same time so often that it’s scary.  You understand the subtleties of a look and speak without words; like the “get this creep away from me” glare, or “what the fuck is she wearing” gaze.

Love.  This by far is what I’ve learned holds friendships together.  It is unconditional.  There is no mileage, no lapse of time, and no life-altering event that can change this.  You could talk every day, or once a week, but everything you have is still there.  You know and understand all the reasons why you’re friends, and you’re thankful every day. 

------

                I'm going to be asking for favors for the rest of my life.  For all my friends out there: get ready to put your pants on and help a sister out.

A Bit Reminiscent

          Just taking a little stroll down memory lane (My Documents) and found this little gem I wrote after all the stress of applying to graduate school and not knowing what the hell I wanted to do with my life.  Hopefully it resonates.

 

QUANTITATIVE REASONING: 35 MINUTES

            You have reached the quantitative reasoning section of the GRE.  Congratulations.  You may not look back at previous tests once this portion has started, so too fucking bad if you’re still stuck on the question about the contrasting arguments in the passage about the Navajo Indian remains found in New Mexico, on which you just spent 7 minutes ruminating, and too fucking bad if you missed the definition of ‘ruminating.’ In this portion of the exam, we will ask questions that involve letters, numbers, pictures, functions, formulas and charts, probably some of which you have never seen, and we will give you an absurdly limited amount of time to finish them.  We have designed quantitative reasoning to allow left-brained, logic-zealots to look like glistening thoroughbreds in the race to graduate school, grabbing the attention of Ivy League suitors who are willing to bet on the favorites.  For those of you who are right-brained and have a nauseous aversion to logic and reasoning and would rather spend hours with charcoal and easel or pen and paper or camera and film, this section will parade your weaknesses like a Pekingese in the Preakness.  And don’t get your hopes up that everything will ‘just click’ when you see the test material.  This is not Good Will Hunting.  And you are not Matt Damon.

            There are a total of 20 questions and 35 minutes for this portion of the test.  Don’t try to calculate how to pace yourself now; we know it’ll take all the energy you can muster to figure out the conundrums beyond this page.  We hope that 500-something page book you bought over the summer works to your advantage, even if you completed (and by completed, we mean skimmed) 4 out of 9 of the practice sections and retained none of the lessons that the book offered.  Surely, you remember some material from high school math classes, because despite your groans of, “I will never use this is real life,” your teachers hammered it into you how important trigonometry and pre-calculus become in your daily life, and you believed them, because who ever questions a high school math teacher?  We understand that it was your choice to slack on GRE prep, because you were so busy chasing after three children, because if you’re going to attend graduate school, you must have some way to pay for it, preferably a full-time job that involves no paper trail.  Your choices were drug cartel or summer nanny.  You chose wisely and we applaud your judgment, but we regret to inform you that you will not receive any points for that on the GRE.  Please remain seated for the duration of the test and keep fidgeting to a minimum.  Our monitors really don’t want to come out from behind the glass window and tell you to stop adjusting your ponytail and distracting the other test takers.  Relax; this is only one of the make-it or break-it factors for graduate school.

            Pressure is measured by the equation PV = nRT; pressure multiplied by volume equals amount of substance multiplied by the constant (8.3145 J/mol K) multiplied by the temperature.  Meaghan, Kathleen, and Jessica are all sisters.  Meaghan and Kathleen both completed their undergraduate study at a small, private, liberal arts college in Memphis, TN.  Both pursued law degrees at prestigious, top-25-schools-of-law in the nation.  They received the same LSAT score, which ranked them in the 98^th percentile for all LSAT takers that year.  Surely, they would have received near perfect scores on the GRE, as well.  No pressure.  Plump scholarship bundles allowed them to reduce the amount of the loans that they would inevitably pay back when both of them become partners at a firm and are making north of $250,000.  Jessica has never had the desire to be a lawyer or a doctor or anything with a practical function.  Jessica writes for enjoyment.  In the dead of night, she can’t stop the synapses that signal her right hand to pick up a pen or a keyboard or a phone and start writing, typing, recording messages of words that have fallen so deliberately and temporarily into place and beg to be remembered.  She realizes most writers shiver in the winter behind the paper-thin, smoke-stained walls of their “New! Refurbished! Great Neighborhood!” apartments and eat canned ravioli out of calcium-crusted bowls.  No pressure.  Graduate school no longer creeps up as an option, but butts in as a necessity.  If the volume of the disappointed sighs is at its loudest and if the room temperature constantly rises when the graduate school talk slips into conversation, then how many people counting on Jessica does it take for her to fold under the pressure?

Forty-one thousand, three hundred and fifty marbles are put into a bag labeled, 'GRADUATE SCHOOLS.'  As your hand shakes and your bowels clinch, you close your eyes and grab seven marbles, without replacement.  What is the probability that you will scrape by the application deadlines for all seven schools, and what are the odds that each will require a hokey, get-to-know-you essay (most likely, given your past ratio of luck to misfortune, all will have slightly variant prompts so you can't write the same thing seven times), wherein you use the canned, overwritten phrase that always comes to mind when you're asked to write about your future: "Since I can remember, I've always wanted to write"?  Because since you can remember, you’ve been filling up cheap Staples notebooks with wordy passages that flow seamlessly between pages and attempted screen plays you never had time or encouragement to finish and the occasional catharsis with raw, impulsive emotion behind all the “fuck”s and “shit”s and “what the hell am I doing?”s. Television writing became your dream before you even knew what television writing was.  When you were younger, MADtv would be dully playing in the background during dinner, and you’d catch hints of laughter every few moments and think to yourself, that will be my job.  These seven schools represent your chances to emulate what you experienced during your childhood, and perhaps make another starry-eyed six-year-old find her calling.  What fraction of those schools is looking for an acute little girl with exponential talent, but whose total sum is still unknown because she's crass and stubborn like her father, but overly sensitive like her mother, and can't find a way to balance either side of the equation?

            There are 3 points on a map: Boston University, Sacred Heart University, and Brooklyn College, labeled respectively, A, B and C.  If point A is 151.3 miles from point B, and point B is 68.1 miles from point C, when does it stop hurting that all hypothetical points revolve around a relationship that ended in a text, saying "I love you but," and you knew exactly what was coming, so instead of asking for a good 'but,' you just asked for a goodbye?   And as acceptance letters rolled in, you ached to revel in the fact that you're going to graduate school, but instead, you ached as you pictured the geometric shapes of his face, and the 90 degree angles of the walls in the apartment you'd planned to own, and the precise circumference of the coffee table in the living room that bled into the kitchen, but you’d already established that it was okay if your apartment was shitty and small, because all you'd need was one another.  Too much time playing with imaginary numbers, cubing them and squaring them and swearing at them until they would become real, piecing together the factors that would never exist except in an alternate reality.  So much emphasis on i and -i and not enough on the I that you started to become the negative I.  Focusing so much on the unknown variable that you forgot the formula.  And the structure.  And you stood at the board scratching your head wondering why your answers are always wrong.  If you are 21 years old, and put all you had into a six-year relationship, what percentage of your life did you waste living it for someone else?  Including birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s days, and Christmases, how much time and money did you put into a relationship that you and your therapist knew damn well was too one-sided to ever last?  At what point do you move on, despite the proximity of the cities? At what point will you be comfortable admitting that you are okay if your lives no longer intersect, and at what point would a hypothetical glance on the subway not make you fall to pieces?

            Two non-parallel lines with the midpoints of (NOW, -NOW) and (THEN, -THEN) on a plane intersect at a certain point.  If you know that NOW= (THEN + -THEN)(-NOW), then NOW = 0, and this is your clean slate, and the THENs cancel out because they don't matter anymore, and the -NOW multiplied by itself only leaves a positive integer, because in this realm, two negatives make a positive because you're pretty damn positive there's no room for negativity now.  Then, you couldn’t withstand the pressure.  You applied for the wrong reasons.  No one likes a conformist simply going through the motions, no matter how educated she is.  You had your dependent variables lined up as you checked off each one: 1. make something of yourself and make your parents proud; the disappointment in their eyes when you used the excuse “taking a year off” was enough to shame any daughter into racking up more student loans and a supplementary degree, because they knew (and you subconsciously knew, too) “a year off” would turn into “a few years off,” which would turn into “I’m comfortable with my bachelor’s degree.”  2. delay life; you wanted to slow things down and put off responsibility, even if you didn’t know what that responsibility would even be yet.  You were so uncertain of what you even wanted and you just knew it was too soon to pursue it without a graduate school buffer.  Now, you realize looking back that you were painfully attentive to all desires, except your own.  Appeasing the dependent variables, you were unable to establish the independent variable.  The variable that stands on its own.  The variable that is unaffected by outside forces.  The variable that says, this is what I want, and all of you can just sit on it.  You remember your first graduate school interview, and as soon as it was over, you burst into tears and called your mother, because it was at that point that you realized you were doing it for all the right reasons.  You knew who you were, and you knew what you wanted and where you were going and someone saw that in you.  You want experience, you want gain, you want day in and day out to be rooted in something you love. You will stand up and say I am passionate about me, and only me, and going off on this tangent will be a sine that you are not willing to cosine your life away with anyone else; the point at which these lines intersect can only be (FUTURE, FUTURE). 

I'll Do It Myself

                If you ask my parents what my first phrase as a baby was, I’m sure they’d give a mundane answer like, “I’m hungry,” or “I pottied,” or “goddamnit, Jessica” (we repeat what we hear, right?).  I, however, would disagree and have to say it was, “I’ll do it myself.”  And even if I didn’t say it aloud, I know the words were bouncing from cortex to cortex, unmumbling themselves, trying to carry the weight that they would hold one day; when my mom poured my cereal, when my dad tied my shoes, when my sisters helped me put toothpaste on my bristles, my synapses were screaming, “LET. ME. DO. THIS.”

                It’s the eve of my 22^nd birthday, and I would make a wise conjecture that Taylor Swift was not in my position when she wrote that pop song that will forever occupy the Facebook statuses of all those entering Twenty-Two-Dom who have nothing else wittier to say on social media.  If I were to re-write a few verses, maybe it would go something like this:

“It feels like the perfect night to look over my lease forms,
and sign on the X’s, uh uh, so broke.
It feels like the perfect night, to crash before midnight,
‘cause I got a real job, uh uh, still broke…

…We should have warned you,
get used to feeling 22.”

Or something along those lines.  I doubt it would have received much radio play.

                I didn’t know what independence was until this summer.  I’ve had the, “I’ll do this myself” attitude for years, but during the past few months, I’ve realized it’s hard to walk when you haven’t quite mastered the crawl.  Let’s be honest, up until this summer, I was still shitting myself with contentment and sitting in my Huggies, waiting for mom and antibacterial wipes to come to the rescue (if we’re sticking with the baby metaphor, we may as well not half-ass it).  I have lived in comfort my entire life, and was so busy “claiming my independence” that I failed to face the fact that I had no idea what independence entailed.  You can’t buy it on the emergency VISA that your parents gave you (wherein the lenient, self-governed stipulations state Cole Hahn and Michael Kors as your primary emergency contacts).  Independence is a responsibility.  And a goal.  And a mindset that correlates positively with well-being.  And sometimes gaining it ain’t no stroll in the Lexus that your mom lets you borrow that runs on company gas.  But the paradox is, to find it, you have to say, “I’ll do it myself.”

                I stared at the ad on Craigslist.  To call, or not to call; that is the question.  And depending on the answer, I could A.) be homeless in September B.) have a cozy, albeit very expensive, studio apartment for myself and my little pup secured for a year, or C.) take my chances and let some whackjob with a corndog fetish contact me and ask if I want in on “a super-chronic, 3 br 2 ba apt, HOT GIRLS PREFERABLY**”

(**this was an actual ad on Craigslist.  Minus the corndog part.  That was just an assumption).

I e-mailed my mom immediately.  My mother; the woman who paid to put me through Catholic school K-12, a private college for 4 years, and numerous graduate school application fees and visits  (my dad deserves credit here, as well, but he was the second one I contacted; that’s always been our chain of communication [unless I need a DD, then it’s Dad all the way]).  I sent her pictures of the small, $1,225/month studio in a nice area, only a mile and a half from campus that also happened to be pet-friendly.  I was almost giddy when I sent the e-mail, waiting for her approval.  The response I received wasn’t one I was used to: “That’s great! It’s your apartment, if you feel comfortable paying for it and you like it, get it.  It’s your decision.”

Wait.  What?  I just…I can get it…wait…is there a catch here?  You always make me ask permission for big decisions!  Like, remember when I had to ask for permission before spending the night at Kim Toop’s house after prom, and then after you gave me permission, you called to check to see if I was there, and I wasn’t because I wanted to go somewhere where I knew parents weren’t home and bottles would be poppin’?  Remember that, mom?  I NEED PERMISSION.  I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS MYSELF.

Desperately, I turned to my dad.  He was always the more level-headed and financial of the two Hines parents.  I know he’ll have some reservations.

“looks great.  Love the vids. Up to you.”

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE JUST GIVE ME PERMISSION?!  I need someone to affirm that I am making the right decision.

And then it hit me.  Like a truckload of tequila.

I. Am. An. Adult.  Those words felt heavy.  Like I had just lost something that I had been clinging to for the past 21 years; the security of having every move monitored, every step supported, and most acerbically, all decisions dichotomized by the parental panel before approval.

                This was the first of many adult things (by “adult” I mean, “expensive beyond my means”) I had to do.  And while half of me was scared shitless to sign that lease agreement and send in my first savings-account-obliterating payment, half of me started to feel liberated.  And excited.  And despite the fact that I’d be MC Hammer broke after making all the payments for my new temporary home, I felt a sense of pride and self-sufficiency that I had never experienced before.  Coming from the girl who still makes her mother call the dentist and gynecologist to make her appointments, this was one step closer to being a fully functioning adult in the real world (and hopefully one step closer to sleeping without my bathroom light on).

                The preparation for graduate school hasn’t been easy, nor has the transition.  I think back to 7 months ago when I had my fingers crossed, hoping some program somewhere would see potential (which was especially questionable, considering most of my writing samples included the staples of my writing: sarcasm and profanity) in me.  The day I received an e-mail from Boston University’s College of Communication, ranked 8^th in the U.S., I was driving on IN-62, and started bawling (I know it’s bad enough that I’m checking my e-mail while driving, but what’s even worse is crying and singing to myself “This Girl Is On Fire” while trying to navigate the backroads of southern Indiana).  That’s when I knew my shit was going to get rocked here pretty soon, and I was hellbent on being ready for it. 

                Since my acceptance, I’ve been weaning myself off my dependence on others.  There’s never been a feeling more visceral (and cringe-worthy, at times) than knowing that you are your own keeper.  And I’m all about the nitty-gritty and the down and dirty, so bring it on.  When it comes to my future and my goals, I figure it’s better if I do it myself.  If I believe in my talents, then who the hell can tell me that I can’t?  I’d rather do it by myself.

                So here I am.  On the eve of my 22^nd birthday.  Sipping Oliver Peach Honey wine, and watching my little furball make pee spots on the carpet as I blog.  And you know, I can’t help but be happy for myself.  Because through all the years of guidance, I found independence.  Come September, I’ll have $32,000 sitting in my bank account, and Uncle Sam will be happily draining me with sky-high student loan interest rates.  I’ll have tuition to pay, and rent to make, and groceries to buy and a life all on my own.  And despite my protests, I may even have a little help from my parents—you can call it the Fund for Future Starving Artists.  But no matter what I’m up against, I think this process has empowered me and made me realize that I’ll have to do it myself.