No one tells you when you graduate college how incredibly hard the transition into "adulthood" is or at least no one warned me. I remember everyone talking about the big change of going to college and being on your own for the first time, but honestly, as hard as that was, it was cake walk compared to what came next. In college you have a community surrounding you, friends living right down the hall, a set social calendar....things that you take for granted. When you leave college, you have to be much more intentional about all those things and it was very hard for me. It has been two (yes two! ahh!) years since I graduated college and I still feel like I'm having trouble adjusting. It has definitely gotten easier, but sometimes I fall into this funk and just wish I could go back to how it was.
Now, I don't want to be a person always wishing for the "good 'ol days." I mean, college was great, but I don't want to get stuck in the idea that the best is behind me. Donald Miller writes in his book
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life,
"We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and only that, it would be beautiful again." Sometimes I feel I fall into this trap and that scares me. If only I had this (insert material possession) or if only I was with (insert cute boy) or if only I was back (insert college memory).
Looking forward with hope and patience is easy to say, but not so easy to do. In fact, as a single Christian girl in her early twenties, it is sometimes terrifying and even frustrating. I look around at friend after friend entering serious relationships, getting engaged and tying the knot. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only single girl left in my circle friends. (I'm not, but dang, it's getting close.) I know I'm young and smart and full of potential and there is nothing wrong with being single. But like I said earlier, in addition to college surrounding you with a community, it also provides something else: boys. Believe it or not, even though my college had a VERY small supply of boys, it was more than I have now. I mean, I'm an elementary school teacher....there is like 1 man for every 30 women. Not great odds. In addition to making friends, meeting guys isn't so easy as an adult either.
Being only 23, I am not in a HUGE rush to get married, but hey, people get lonely. And not having that safety net of college to fall back on, being single out in the world can be very scary. Don Miller also writes that
""fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life." I don't want this fear of aloneness cripple my enjoyment of where I am right now as a single woman. I actually started counseling a year and a half ago (more on that in another post) and my counselor helped me map out a few goals of what I want (and CAN) do as a single woman. She helped me see the many opportunities I have now and that I should waste. But in order to not waste it, I have to be INTENTIONAL. An exciting, fulfilling life isn't just going to happen. After thinking about what I want to do NOW, I decided to travel more (NYC, London, soon Portland), join a gym, start painting, and read more. I have the time, why not use it?
Being a grown-up is hard and it does hurt at times, but I no longer want to go back to being a kid or a "pretend adult" in college. I want to look forward and embrace what God has planned for me. The changes He has for me will transform me into the woman He wants me to be.
"...[My friend Marco said] essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability and then they find themselves at an ending tha seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. ...[I wondered] that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change." (Don Miller)
