Quarter-Life

Your parents moved out of a one-bedroom, roach-infested apartment in a shitty neighborhood and bought a house in the suburbs. This tiny three-bedroom ranch house was like a mansion compared to the closet you used to call home and you and your siblings ran around the living room with your mouths hanging open. When the summer ended, you became the new kid at the local elementary school and you cried all week and vomited in the middle of the cafeteria while confused classmates stared at you with wide doe eyes. Grade school became junior high. Thrust for the first time amongst children you hadn’t grown up with, making new friends and becoming popular became paramount. You failed and no one liked you, but junior high only lasted two years, and soon enough you were in high school. You smoked your first cigarette, got drunk, went on your first date, smoked drugs, got a body piercing, swallowed pills, snuck out of the house, adopted a bizarre fashion sense, screamed at your parents and packed your bags for college. You spent your college years figuring out where you fit in while watching super-super senior frat boys convert their student loans into liver damage. You found yourself in your first serious relationship, funneled your first beer, became a theatre and creative writing geek, survived for weeks on ramen noodles and popcorn, spent a semester in Ireland, made out with someone ugly and graduated with a degree in English.

And then life began.

When I was a kid, the idea of twelve years of school, plus four more years of college, and possibly another two years of grad school was beyond my comprehension. Time existed in hours and minutes, and the concept of years was beyond me. But the time somehow manages to speed ahead and send you barreling headfirst into the reality that exists outside the safe confines of education and dormitories and office hours and classes and teachers who hold your hand on the way to the bathroom. Suddenly you’re sitting alone at an interview for a job you don’t want, fidgeting in your suit and trying to remember what you’re supposed to say as opposed to what you want to say. You’re applying to entry-level positions that require a minimum of two years experience and wondering if there is a parallel universe you were supposed to slip into between graduation day and the application process where you collect experience points via office challenges—make three pots of coffee within five minutes, file 50 documents in ten minutes, copyedit four manuscripts in one hour. So you suck it up and take that crappy job figuring any experience is better than none, and at the end of the day, when you finally abandon it all to get on the road to do what you want to be doing, everyone’s closing the door because somewhere along the line you fucked up and your resume has been stamped with a big red “unemployable.”

Yes, there was a time in my life when I wanted to act. I can’t say for certain that that time has completely passed, but I did what all successful people don’t do and decided to be realistic. Now, as I truly begin on the road towards a career in writing, I’m doing everything within my power not to be realistic. I’m trying to shut myself away from the chorus of pity, the “you should go into marketing instead”s, the job offers in finance, the silence that fills my inbox. I keep applying to the positions I know I won’t hear from, steadily lowering my compensation standards, reading websites about how to freelance, how to get an agent, how to write a proposal.

“What do you want to do?” my coworker in London asked me as we sat in the Snooty Fox drinking pints and discussing the steps I need to take to get a job as a writer.

“Everything,” I said, without missing a beat.

She laughed. “I’m laughing because I know you’re completely serious.”

I want to make a living being creative. To be able to wake up in the morning and love the work laid out before me. To have the liberty to travel. To have financial security. To do things the right way.

I don’t want to sell myself short. To be chained to a 9-to-5. To have to answer to someone else. To set my standards on someone else’s terms. To have a routine. To have to wait.

As I slowly discover the process and the politics behind getting where I want to be, it grows increasingly difficult to remain hopeful. You can have talent, but if you can’t prove your marketability, you’re useless. Proposals, much like auditions for an actor, go against everything you learn as a writer. You spend years making sure every word in a 300-page manuscript serves the function you intend for it, and an editor asks you to summarize, in three pages or less, what the book is about and why they should publish it. Vivid descriptions and character development take a backseat to tales of drug use and lewd sexuality. Bloggers sell book rights based solely on the merit of the internet persona they choose to embody. Much like the silicone-infused actress treks to Hollywood fame with a brief pitstop in Soft Porn City, mainstream writing becomes a joke. So, I stand at a crossroads. I can give up and resign myself to a lifetime of steady paychecks and dull routines, or I can continue on this road, one that does carry the potential to lead to ultimate failure. I can continue doing what it is I'm supposed to do, make every effort not to compromise my ideals and blindly rest my faith in the belief that hard work and dedication lead to success.

But what happens when you do everything you need to do to get where you want to be, and the ride that was supposed to meet you in the middle never shows up?

-L