Closer To The Moon (I)

(You may have to click on it to read it.)

I have two co-workers on my team on-site at the Boys & Girls Club. One, Eric, is 27. The other, Kellyn, is 22. I just turned 26.

Eric and I have been talking a bit (and Kellyn probes, maybe because this might be her future) about how many people around our age are feeling the pressure to get married, have a house, have a kid. Not too many people who have actually done it, but who feel anxious because they thought they’d be there by now. One of the BGC employees, Willy, had just come back from his honeymoon; he’s maybe a year older than Eric. When Eric said “how’s it going” one day, Willy shrugged and said, “it never ends.”

When Eric asked what he meant, Willy sighed and went on, “every day you eat dinner, and then you wash your plate. And depending on what you ate you wash the plate a little differently, but in the end it still goes in the same place.”

Willy’s the kind of guy who busts on the kids in his affectionate/asshole way. It seems kind of important to him to be buddies with them, and to also be devoutly respected. The kind of guy who’s still basically a high school senior, the kind of jock that usually ends up a gym teacher.

Kellyn asked us if we feel a pressure to get married. Eric said that not only did he not, he feels that the idea that adulthood means “married with a mortgage and a kid by 30″ is a very young notion of maturity. But what I said was I felt a similar anxiety. I said “it’s not that I want to be getting married, working a desk job and getting a house. It’s just I thought whatever I was going to do instead I’d have figured out by now. I thought that I’d have a thing that I do every day, and kind of have a bead on how to do it. But every day I still feel like I’m winging it.” Eric expressed a similar feeling of improvising your life. I suppose it’s why people join the military. (It might be why we joined AmeriCorps.)

Talking to my shrink about it this past week, we discussed how your first 12 years of school offer you a template. You get up at set hours and have these things you’re supposed to do every day. As you get older you get a little more wiggle-room, as when in high school you can at least pick your electives, but I remember being excited for the day I could write my own template. Then there’s graduation, the end of the world, and you’re offered the college template, which is a lot more than just a class schedule. College is understood to be many things, experimentation with drugs, sex, sexual orientation, friendships and your own personality. You’re expected to move away from home for the first time and “find yourself.” Ze Frank phrased it well when he said “college is like taking a step closer to the real world. Kind of like how climbing a tree gets you closer to the Moon.”

After college there’s a vague template that goes like this: get a job with a decent salary and room to ascend (probably in an office and if related to your degree, only peripherally), date til you find a wife or husband, have an expensive wedding, get a house, have a kid, retire eventually, die.

I think a lot of the world sort of casually rejects this notion when they’re young, but in the backs of our minds we consider “growing up” to be accepting this template. (I don’t know about you but I thought the ending to Knocked Up was the most fucking depressing thing in the world.) I went to art school, which is peopled with the kinds of creative types who do not casually but quite emphatically reject this template. I’m sure may other types reject it as well. The problem is that school taught me to follow templates; not only did life never offer me my own, it never taught me how to write one. Every day I’m making it up as I go, and I’m 26 now and I still don’t think I’ve got it figured out. I don’t know how to figure it out.

Reading this final comic of Dar, then, came at the right time (as things always do when you’re looking for them). It presented the idea that maybe you don’t ever really “figure it out,” that you keep winging it and suddenly you stumble into it. From the sound of it, she never had a specific goal in mind, and she spent much of the time being a complete mess. But then one day she finds herself in a situation that makes her happy and fulfilled, without much clear idea of how the fuck she got there. She was an artist, and the only thing she did (sporadically, intermittently) was keep making art.

She was 26. It was 2010.

And I look at where my life was when I was 20. And compared with where I am now, it does look like I could plot a trajectory. I’m in a job I truly care about for the first time, I’m in a fledgling relationship that not only makes me happy but had an actual beginning this time, I still haven’t produced a film but I’ve written a few, I have more projects with more ambition and in more formed stations of production. I still feel as though I’m making it up as I go along, and maybe this thinking is all placebo effect, but placebos can be powerful things when you use them properly.

What I take from Dar is that you go out to sea and you do finally end up somewhere. You end up a grown-up. It’s not that she’ll never be a mess again. It’s that she found her own meaning of adulthood.

(there are, of course, people locked in patterns of dysfunction that always end up right where they started again, but I look at my history and I think I’ve broken out of the serious ones)

(also, Dar favorites: 1, 2, 3.)