The Place In Between

Polly Adams
Aug 28, 2017 · 6 min read

There’s a specific type of sympathetic smile you get when discussing your recent college graduation with someone who’s lived as an adult for any amount of time. Responses are varied but always positive and guaranteed to come with one follow up question: “So, what’s next?” Even if you have an answer for your next step, they know that you’re probably feeling unsure about it. This is when the sympathy smile slips in.

In my case, I’ve had a set plan even before I started my last quarter at school — I would return to the company I interned at the previous Summer, on the promise of getting to do so in the greener, lemon-tree growing pastures of the San Francisco Bay Area. I received a rejection letter from one company, heard nothing from five others, and had a week to decide if I was going to take the job in a new place I thought I had no hope of being offered in the first place. Despite never having visited California, and knowing I was forgoing other opportunities that may arise by committing to my first offer, I said yes and cemented these facts about my life for the next calendar year: 1. I would graduate, 2. spend a month and some change at home, 3. go to a work training in Austin for three months, and then 4. move to California. I mentioned these four facts regularly, any time the subject came up. I had a plan. I was ahead of the curve. I felt like the safety blanket I was afraid I’d never get was suddenly folded neatly in my lap.

Then, something strange happened: Time passed, as it usually does.

I finished my obligations at school, drove across the country back home to Denver, and was somehow a college graduate. High on accomplishment, I planned and went on an adventure with my boyfriend to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to celebrate that I had “figured it out”. We had a glorious full week and a half of experiencing incredible art, history, and food, but somehow I still spent every spare moment between activities worrying about my plan falling apart, and ended up drowning my insecurity about the future in fancy cheese, fine wine, and crêpes.

When I got back home, reality finally began to sink in.

Just to clarify, there’s nothing I love more than sitting in our family living room covered in golden retriever fur, talking with my parents about anything and everything. But after weeks of holiday season limbo, it started to feel like my life was just on pause. I spent a month at home waiting for the third part of my official plan to begin, going back to Austin for three months for design bootcamp at IBM. My break felt like it would never really end. It was so amazing to feel comfortable back at home, but after a while it began to feel like I wasn’t supposed to be there anymore. Everyone went back to school, continued their lives, and I was sitting in my childhood bedroom watching Netflix by myself while my parents where at work, living their own lives.

The time I spent at home made me realize how much of my life has been task-oriented. For the first time I could really remember, I didn’t have anything I felt like I had to do. I didn’t have assignments to finish. I didn’t have anyone to report to, or any sort of deadlines. I couldn’t hunt for apartments in San Francisco, because the turn over is too quick and I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t pack, because I wasn’t sure what situation I’d find myself in there months later (to U-Haul a small couch and live by myself, or to not U-Haul a small couch and find a fully furnished house with 6 roommates?). I was finally free to “relax”, and “have time to myself” just as I had spent the last several years waiting for. Plot twist: after a lifetime of moving from one requirement to the next, I had no idea how to sit still, and was consistently restless. Caught in between steps two and three in my fool-proof four-step journey to adulthood, I was unable to look to the future. Every day felt simultaneously endless and precious, and I tried to survive and savor each moment.

As humans, we contextualize our lives by how we spend our time. We get jobs. We fall in love. We start families. We build homes. We buy groceries. We plan. But sometimes we’re not very good at noticing our lives as they pass by while we’re busy planning how we’d like them to be later. Try as we may, time will never slow to give us more time to do so, or pass more quickly to bring us there sooner. Time really only does one thing for us: persist.

The phrase “in between” has become somewhat synonymous with “nothingness”, at least in comparison with what lies on either side.

The place in between different stages of our lives can feel underwhelming and frustrating when you think you have a solid idea of what comes before and after. But I’m learning more each day that the boundaries that separate these stages can be blurry, and it’s probably for the best. Transitioning between young adult life in college and your life beyond is startling. You’re not preparing for your future abstractly any more. You suddenly have a vast ocean called “the rest of your life” in front of you. What you thought was a well-designed, long endurance speed boat suddenly looks more like a rickety canoe captained by a drunk monkey. It’s unrealistic for most people to finish school one day, and then feel like a completely functioning well-oiled adult machine the next. For me, my time wrapping up school used most of the energy I had left in me from the hell of year 2016 turned out to be. It felt necessary to pause, and see my time at home as temporary nothingness before a fully-charged Polly 2.0 could re-enter the world at high capacity.

What really happened during this time in between school and work is everything I didn’t know I needed: I walked my dogs every day. I went to yoga. I went to bars with friends from high school. I went hiking. I went on coffee dates with my dad. I made new friends in Boulder, and spent lots of time snuggling with old ones. I slept in and made pancakes for my parents on Sundays, and woke up early to read (for fun, what a concept). I drank a dent into my dad’s impressive coffee supply.

Nothing ended up being everything, and it passed me by with out me even realizing it.

Once you’ve moved into a job, you start to realize that every minute outside of your work is solely yours. You can share it with others, use it take up pottery, or kick boxing, or making artisanal soap — whatever you very well please. But, at the end of the day, the only person that can really give it value or take it away is you. A couple of weeks into my three-month design bootcamp before moving to California, my transition into post-collegiate life has finally began to feel real. It’s weird, and uncomfortable, and I’m still working out the kinks. I’ve found it’s a lot easier to manage once you allow yourself time to really experience the blurry line between one phase of life and the next, because even space that seems empty carries more significance when you realize your journey through it is fleeting, and pause buttons don’t actually exist.

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Polly Adams

Written by

designer + researcher / writer + doodler / bagel fan (www.pollylouadams.com)

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