Eventually

I moved into my (air conditioning-less) first-year dorm with a truckload of boxes and a plan. At 18, I knew everything.

Fast-forward two years and all that “knowledge” has been lost. The reality is a collection of sprawled limbs on a makeshift futon and turnabout conversations that no one can ever quite recall. But then again, I feel as if college is one big hole-I’ve-fallen-into-and-I-can’t-get-back-up moment.

Sometimes when I’m walking down the street, I can hear the ticking of a timer, a timer that was set the moment I moved to New York. The ticking clock follows me, reminding me of the urgent need to do something, anything. Instead I loaf around Butler, drink too much sugared-down coffee, say stupid things, and take strange, this-is-not-at-all-relevant-to-my-major classes (hello, Mormonism). The city disillusions you. Nothing makes you feel more human and more destructible than the skyscrapers of accomplishment that surround you.

I walked into Thanksgiving dinner last week and simultaneously into a banquet of loaded questions. What are your career goals? Do you have a five-year plan? How’s the job market for writers? Have you thought about grad school? Why do you wear so much flannel?

I’m going into finals with a half a mile long to-do list forming in the back of my mind, and now I have to think about what I’m going to be when I grow up?

Breaks from the city make you grateful for its anonymity. No one cares if you succeed or fall flat on your face. You fail and you move on, you succeed and you’re yesterday’s news. Except that all your high school friends are just waiting for you to become the local news anchor, marry, have babies, and start voting Republican.

I’ve put off thinking about the future for far too long. I’ve only got three more semesters left of college. And then what? I’m an English major: I like words and hate cubicles. But pretty words don’t guarantee career stability.

This summer as I piddled around at a magazine internship, I decided to live by the mantra, “The purpose of life is to fight maturity.” Big bold letters on poster board that hung over my futon, as if I needed a reminder, an essential excuse to liken stupidity to youth. After three months of too much cool and too little sleep, it turned out that the purpose of life wasn’t to fight maturity. (Hint: there’s no such thing as forever young.) But it’s a fun distraction for a while.

And that’s what college has been—the ultimate distraction. As much as New York is a manifestation of the survival of the fittest, the city is also a carnivalesque sideshow of freaks, of pure unadulterated self-indulgence. Humans aren’t programmed to merely survive. The search for pleasure trumps the survival instinct every time—if it didn’t, we’d all be well-adjusted adults and Dunkin’ Donuts would go out of business. Some are just better at resisting the distractions. And others find themselves at trivia night at 1020. Did I know that the Missouri and Mississippi rivers converged just north of St. Louis? Yes, I did. Did I make it to my classes the next morning? No, I did not.

Eventually I’ll get there—when I was a first-year I thought I knew what “there” meant—my destination is less certain now, but for the better. I’ve enjoyed the world’s-biggest-ball-of-yarn-type distractions along the way and I’m not necessarily ready to stop pulling over (and apparently, as a writer, I should use these distractions to work on my metaphors). At 18, everything you know is an absolute—today, I realize that absolute truth doesn’t exist. I know I’ll do something eventually. I’ll get there eventually. But for now I just need to figure out what nouns to replace words like ‘there’ and ‘something’ with. The timer will run out or the ticking will drown out the distractions, I’ll get a job and maybe even pull together a plan. Or I’ll stumble around until I fall ass backwards into success—that’s how life works, right?

The author is a Barnard College junior majoring in English.

Tags: Opinion, Ena Brdjanovic, Wendan Li, After Columbia, New York City