The day I graduated college Donald Trump announced his candidacy.
This is the introduction to Hindsight 20/Something, a book of 1st person perspectives by twenty-somethings on loss, transition, and the quarter life crisis.

Being 23 is always crazy.
But being 23 right now?
It can feel like living an inch under the apocalypse.
June 16th, 2015 was the day I graduated college — something neither of my parents had done. My mom took lots of photos. My dad who doesn’t cry, cried.
To the rest of the world, June 16th, 2015 was the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the president of the United States.
My life, Donald’s life, our planet’s life was changing.
Oceans rising. More than just California was burning.
What is success when you’re young and your country is literally on fire?
Right now The Story of The Successful is waking and meditating, automatically paying student debt with a monthly payment, drinking at brunch, carrying adult things without a backpack from the car into a glass building and into a smaller office, towards a cubicle to click on links and look into an internet with reports quoting scientists writing the effects of climate change are irreversible.
Swipe right, swipe left. Hashtag it or not. Carry it back to your parents’ house or overly-expensive apartment.
How irreversible is irreversible?
I was 23, staying at a Hilton Garden Inn in an unglorified suburb of Riverside the night Donald Trump was elected.
At the bar in the lobby were a group of real adults older than me drinking and hollering. All white. Men and women. They didn’t talk like they were from the West Coast and seemed to be visiting California for work. One wore a MAGA hat and whenever Fox News celebrated another state winning, he’d yell “And Alabama chooses to…?” and the rest would cheer “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
I sat nearby with my journal and watched them: 7 American citizens like me, partying and talking to the TV. Eventually they noticed and there was a confrontation. I don’t remember what was said, but it resulted in the bartender intervening and sending a man with a gray beard to his room for the night who had just poked me in the chest multiple times while slurring close-ended questions about Hillary Clinton’s connection to satanism.
My cheeks were warm. Growing up in rural Oregon, outside a liberal poster-child like Portland, I felt surprised and not surprised.
They all went to bed eventually, tipsy and sleeping better than half the country.
“How old are you, kid?” the young-ish, hotel bartender said. “Old enough to buy you a drink? It’s on me.”

What does it mean to be a kid who isn’t a kid? How many times do we start over?
I’d moved to California 5 months before because I was tired of Oregon rain and tired of myself. I didn’t know any one in town. It was an Instagram filter kind of place: 75 degrees year round, brown street signs with a cursive typeface out of the Hobbit, ornate houses that never locked their doors, a Happiest Town in America ranking featured on Oprah.
I moved there for the only job I got — working at the most expensive California-state university in the system, recruiting low-income students of color to consider a school that they likely couldn’t afford.
The day after the election I visited a school with 80% of its students on federally-funded lunch. Most were Latino.
“It’s a wild time,” I said, walking beside the white high school counselor through the outdoor lunch commons after my presentation. “Any sense how many will be affected, if they’re undocumented?”
“They don’t tell us if they are,” she said. “I just hope there’s a change. We need it. We’ve been spending too much on the illegals and none on the veterans.”
I didn’t respond. I signed out in the front office, walked to my rental car Camry and drove off through the hot, dry valley (a word that to the old me meant refreshing, beautiful, green).
I didn’t like my job and I didn’t not like it. I was grateful for it and wanted anything else. I hated it and I didn’t hate it. Most of the time I was a project manager on excel or a heavy traveler. No creating. I wrote a lot of poems on the clock and printed 200 pages for copies of my first chapbook after everyone left the office, so I wouldn’t get busted.
I felt excited and kid-ish while stealing company printer paper in a town I didn’t know existed for most of my life. 23 years old.
How did I get here?
~
How did we get here?
In this collection our 25 writers are asking themselves that, along with other things and sometimes everything.
Each jumped into the beige unknown of their 20s and found at least something — whether they got laid off, sub-leased a windowless studio or apartment without a door or house with a urinal in the living room, saw a patient rip his own toe off for drugs, slept on an air mattress for a long time, slept on hardwood for longer, got a gun pulled on them at a gas station.
Starting over is hard and exhilarating. The transition can feel as large as being in a new body and as small as going from wandering campus, thinking “where did I park my bike this time?” to wandering parking lots, thinking “where did I park my car this time?”
For our 20-somethings there were times that weren’t okay and were okay. They learned the difference between doing and not doing is simply that. They learned that they’d forgotten again what they’d already learned, and forgotten. That connecting the dots is easier when doing it backwards. That transformation is true and also a myth.
They learned they had a choice. That options are both freeing and not. That choosing what we want right now — over what a past us once predicted we’d want — is rarely easy.
But, it’s a choice worth considering.
And if you choose wrong — whatever that means — then what? Well, it’s probably not the end of the world.
That’ll probably come soon enough.
Hindsight 20/Something will publish this fall. For more follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
