I lived through the high school senior slump and intimately knew the college sophomore slump, but this post-grad slump is feeling more and more like a reckoning by the day. How do you reconcile that your goals – the aspirations of self-employment and Pinterest boards made reality - are still your goals, but they’re not as close as you thought. Now, there’re about a million more undefined steps to reach them. From what I can tell, I think we (I) duped ourselves into thinking that graduating from college and landing a full-time job were the last boxes that needed checking. Of course, there was more work to be done, but everything would ~magically~ fall into place and we, in turn, would fall into easy step.
Mondays are hard (and anticipating them on a Sunday afternoon is harder). They always put me in this headspace. Every week, I jump off the bridge of peace into the abyss of my cubicle and into the readjustment of I-don’t-know-how-the-hell-to-do-my-job (which often manifests into feelings of I-don’t-know-how-the-hell-to-do-my-life).
It’s the Big and Wide I wrote about a few weeks ago. The goal is still finding the circle that grows and contracts as we need it to. But, for the last four months, having lived on the path, however meandering or straight to get to my circle, I’m feeling depleted and exhausted. Overwhelmed and over this.
But wherever you go there you are. And here we are, wherever we are, indefinitely.
I’m convinced everything can become a letdown if you allow it to. Remember when Meek said (sorry, don’t laugh) that he “used to pray for times like this”? I did, too. I used to pray for the chance to sit at this cubicle in this city at this company, come home to my sometimes-too-cold-and-slowly-furnished apartment, and make home for myself in what often feels like Far Away. Pray and cry because I wanted it so badly. And here we actually are. I’d do well to remember that.
So yes, the steps are there and they’re numerous. Maybe even infinite (because we’re never done growing am I right). But think about the infinite steps it took to get to this intermediary step, which when put perspective is a damn big step – probably classifiable as a landing. And now we’re looking up at the next flight of steps which sometimes feels insurmountable and looking towards the next landing we’re not sure when we’ll reach. Starting up again feels damning because we just got here. We want rest, we want satisfaction but apparently our aspirations won’t allow us that just yet (damn them). While sitting in that want, it may be necessary to just take a moment of gratitude and stand and enjoy the landing we’ve reached and even gaze back on the steps we hiked to get here.
That’s counterintuitive to me. Just look at how I started this whole post. But I think we’re slowly winning big over the months and years and winning small every single day. Today was another step each of us climbed, another tiny box checked to let us know we won, at least a little bit, and that’s damn fantastic.