I'm lost and it's a feeling I've had before, when you take a wrong turn and suddenly don't know where you are. But you're driving at night; it's dark, you're emotional and full of angry, so instead of stopping you keep rushing down the highway. You take exits and left turns that look promising, but every move just leads you further away from the route you know. Still, you keep going, because you don't want familiar streets to see this breakdown. A crisis needs an appropriate setting, somewhere strange and forgettable where the road names and landmarks blend together and fade from your memory as soon as they pass. In the back of your head, you know there's a cell phone or GPS that will eventually lead you back home, but for now the car is driving forward as if on its own.
I have this feeling as I stand here sweating under a hot sun in academic robes, shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow 2006 graduates as a seahawk glides over us across a blue sky. My mind is a passenger behind the wheel of a car that is driving aimlessly and getting more lost at every turn.
Now, it's five years later and I'm in the same place. At the same pace, I drive forward full of anxiety towards no destination in particular. I'm waiting for the road sign or town name that I recognize, or for sheer exhaustion to take over until I finally pull off on the side of the road to assess where I've ended up.
My whole generation is waiting. We look to our peers for evidence of our parents' accomplishments: the house, the family, the financially-stable career. But everything is happening out of order, or not at all. We scrape by from job to job like high school drop-outs, struggling every day to make that paycheck meet our bills and avoid the dreaded "boomerang" that defines our failure to live up to society's expectations.
Invisible, we watch as kids four years our junior get hired, promoted, married, and pregnant. We are the forgotten ones, our prospects lost to a recession that hit at the most critical point of our development - like the infant born of a mother who smoked cigarettes and drank hard liquor her whole first trimester. We are unlike the newer and better versions of ourselves, who knew computers when they were in diapers. They have not been through the hardship of the past four years. Fresh off the line, they are energetic and ready to be manipulated to this new world order of smartphones, twelve-hour days, and no privacy. Our little brothers and sisters are moving forward, but we are static. The limitless possibility of their dreams is as airy as the burden of our responsibility is heavy.
Elders will always tell us it's been worse, but history tells me that it's also been better. There have been generations whose formative years have fallen during prosperity, and whose lives have been shaped positively by their time. On the hard days I wonder why that couldn't have been us? Maybe then, we'd all be grown up by now, with mortgages, hybrids, and dinner parties, instead of looking in between the couch cushions for beer money and worrying about that next tank of gas. With all these fears, I forget the dream I was reaching for. What was I hoping for on graduation day? Where did I want to be by now?
Trapped in my car, I'm driving in the dark and full of angry. I keep moving forward, taking exits and left turns that seem promising, but each move only leads me further away from where I want to be. My GPS is out of date, and what I really want to do is just stop and find my way back before I forget where I was going in the first place.
- wit -
