25 & Trying

The Stories We Tell Ourselves ~ Guest Post

This time last year, I had a completely different life.  I lived in a basement studio apartment and commuted an hour each way to an office in downtown DC where I worked a typical 9-5 job (although not on a 9-5 schedule).  It used to be more of a 10-12 hour a day gig, but then the recession hit and they implemented a company-wide freeze on overtime, which was both a blessing and a curse.

I was living the dream.  I had leveraged a good education into a great job in one of the most exciting cities in the world.  My job was educational and intellectually stimulating.  I was devoted to my boss, an incredible woman who had worked her way to the top of a male-dominated field.  She was deeply and profoundly committed to an older kind of feminism; a glass-ceiling shattering, networked, institutional feminism.  I had a career.  I was poised to do anything.  And I walked away.

I got in the car and I drove across the country to a city I’d never seen before.  It wasn’t the first time I’d done that, but it still took my breath away.  Through South Dakota and Wyoming, I watched the mountains rise and fall before me and the plains stretch out towards the unknown horizon.  I never questioned what I’d done.

It wasn’t until months later, sitting in an empty house, the drizzling rain a near-constant companion in this lush, mossy place, that I blinked and realized I didn’t recognize myself.  Who was I?

Six months married (to the Army, how did that happen?!), husband deployed.  Alone.  Unemployed.  Seriously, who was I?

I was talking to my friend the other day about the stories we tell ourselves.  Like me, she married young – she at 23, me at 25.  Maybe that’s not young by some standards, but it feels painfully young to me.  Like me, she quit the kind of job we’re “supposed” to have to pursue a vague dream of miscellaneous freelancing and further education.  She has cats.  I have dogs and a cat.  Neither of us have children (whose presence, it seems, would give both of us an inherent purpose).

My friend and I share two stories, the stories we tell ourselves.  I never know which one I’m going to wake up with on any given day.  And I don’t know which one is true – perhaps because each is a piece of the puzzle, incomplete and completely inaccurate without context.

In the first story, we have failed.  We’ve abandoned a legacy that generations of educated, determined, and incredibly strong women have left for us.  We spend our days flailing around in the unknown and run back to the safety of school because the real world is just too scary.  And I, at least, am dependent on my husband.  Yikes.

Or we’re brave.  We recognized that the system, the model for happiness is broken, or at least is not a means to achieving our personal happiness.  We’ve taken the first steps towards building an alternative that works for us, where we can meet our needs joyfully and with freedom.  We’re pursuing higher education in fields that we find fascinating and meaningful, and we’re doing it at a financially sustainable pace.  We’re thinking outside the box, starting our own businesses, and working steadily towards meeting our goals.

I don’t know what this means for my friend and I.  I don’t know what the future holds for either of us.  But I do know that as much as where we come from shapes the stories we tell ourselves, so too do those stories pave a path.  Perhaps not so much for where we’ll end up, but for the people we feel we’re becoming as we go on our way.

Jess Lundie has a fabulous blog where she writes about sustainability, life, and other wonderful stuff over at Openly Balanced. You can also get to know her on Twitter!