A metaphor for life.
It’s 2019. I live alone. I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life picking up and then going again, settling in, picking up, and settling back in without ever feeling any concrete feeling of “permanence.”
Have you?
I turn 32 in a few days. I’m asking all of you millennials, how did you feel after you were propelled out of the bosom of your family? Did you feel settled in college? Or after?
I recently had a conversation with a fellow millennial about this. I went on a rant to him about how he didn’t understand my story. My rant went something like this…
You don’t understand. My parents went through a divorce that tore my life to shreds, to absolute shreds, when I was 17 years old just a few months after I graduated high school. I didn’t feel I had a safe place to live, so I started working full time and taking community college classes after work. I was working over 60 hours a week. I lost most of my belongings in the divorce… it’s a long story, but my parents sold their house quickly, and things were dispersed amongst my parents and the Goodwill. I didn’t have a sense of safety or sense of self. I always felt I needed to be ready to go. I was always ready for the rug to be pulled out from under me. This manifested through a combination of talking and dreaming about moving away the second I moved somewhere, and never hanging anything on the walls. I eventually reestablished a sense of home for myself. I moved to another state to find myself. I went with my partner at the time, and we settled into a fairly comfortable existence, but the problem continued… I never hung anything on the wall, I constantly talked about moving back to California. It was a constant push and pull for some form of external validation that would fix everything. Then what? We moved back, I started school, we moved from apartment to apartment. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t settled. Nothing felt right or safe or offered me the sense of self I’d been long for. I ended the relationship after 8 years. We’d lived together for 7. It was traumatic, it to tore my life to shreds, to absolute shreds. It was like I was repeating my 17 year old divorce. I was so afraid I would end up like my mother and father. I left “temporarily” at first, and then permanently. I left my belongings dispersed amongst our apartment, my car, and my mother’s house where I was staying. I eventually got my stuff back. It was rushed. My life at my apartment with him felt abandoned. I left him in the wreckage… I went back to get my stuff and my food was still in the fridge, my sweaters in the closet, surrounding him…shreds. I lived with my mom for a few months before I met a new guy and wanted a place of my own. I grabbed everything I owned and moved it into my new place, constantly moving, constantly going. I never even unpacked some of the tote bags that contained contents of drawers, carelessly thrown in. I had boxes that hadn’t been opened in years.
So I asked myself, now is it safe to hang things on the walls? Can I unpack yet? Am I going to leave again in a few months? Years? Does my happiness, safety, and sense of self live in a different apartment? A different job? A different relationship?
After my rant ended… he looked at me and said simply, “Our past isn’t as different as you think.” He proceeded to go on with his rant. It wasn’t exact in the details, but it was the same basic story. Renting rooms and trying different jobs and different partners. He moved back in with his parents for a bit and then out again. His sense of self and safety something he had to build and then rebuild for himself, never really knowing if that sense of permanence would exist for him again.
Maybe this is just a reflection of two people who have had trauma in their lives. Maybe it’s a millennial thing. A reflection of our depression and disorders. Maybe it’s because we are both Californians and life is just so damn expensive here.
So I reach out to you with the question… did any of you feel settled in your twenties? Have you felt propelled into uncertainty and struggled to create stability for yourself?
