‘I am 22 years old and I still can’t remember all nine digits of my social security.’
Clearly, I have no idea what I am doing.
[Editor’s note: “I don’t know what I’m doing” is a recurring personal column that pays homage to Johnny Auping’s “I have no idea what I’m doing” personal column in The New Yorker. Opinions expressed here belong only to the author, and, we hope, nobody else on the planet.–Josh Towner, opinions editor]
By Taylor Fondie | Sports Reporter
A lot of times I go by the saying “fake it till you make it.” Acting as if I am something so I can, in fact, become that thing or motivating myself to act in a different manner to meet my desired goals. Minds are a powerful thing and doing an action enough until I actually become it and internalize is often one way how I learn. I watch what is being done and try to reinterpret it myself, with my own twist. As one would say “monkey see, monkey do.”
I don’t know half the song lyrics I sing in my car, shower, room, etc. However, I sure make it seem like I know the song. Whether its humming the melody in parts of the song I don’t know or dancing to the beat. I sometimes play it off as if I am doing it on purpose rather than not knowing the actual lyrics. If I am really feeling spontaneous I throw my own words into the song pretending as if they match. It took me awhile to figure out that “Kicking your cat all over the place” was actually “Kicking your can all over the place” from Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’.
I don’t know how to mow the lawn. After all I do almost every bit of yard work with my dad and mom yet I have never attempted to mow our 4 acre lot of grass. Lawn mowing seems like a simple chore that doesn’t require much skill- you just push the lawn mower forward and pass back and forth in rows until the whole lawn is covered, right? Actually, there are a lot of mistakes someone can make during lawn mowing that they don’t even realize could be hurting the lawn. Especially when my dad decided to buy a “Toro Gas Dual Hydrostatic 360 Turn Riding Mower” for our yard.
I don’t know exit road names rather I just go off of exit numbers. I have been driving for 6 years now and still don’t pick up the majority of road names. When talking to my dad about directions I will say “take exit 42C” rather than saying take the exit to “Lexington Avenue.” I can visualize all the exit numbers, but yet have no idea what the road names are that I am exiting onto. Most of the time I just follow what Google Maps app tells me to do.
I am 22 years old and I still can’t remember all nine digits of my social security. I have filled out several forms that require my social security number to be written down, yet I always have to refer back to my mom what all of the digits are. For awhile I had my social security number written in my phone notes, until my dad got upset with me, because it is not a safe place to record the numbers. This past year I started to officially remember the last four digits- big steps are being made thanks to repetition of forgetting.
So as you can see I am just a girl figuring out the world day by day. Nevertheless, I think mistakes are met for us to go through and without them we wouldn’t not be the wise people we are as we continuously get older.