September 2011

Sometimes I hate being 23

As a twenty-something, I’m simultaneously expected to know nothing and have everything figured out. I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten unsolicited advice on everything from how to cook dinner to what kind of career to choose. In this respect, I’m nothing but a child, trying desperately to boil water and subsist on mom and dad’s monthly subsistence check (allowance).

How I Was Supposed to Be

I was pretty well liked by my teachers in high school. I wasn’t a particularly zealous student then—you’d never hear me spouting off about Virginia Woolf or expounding on the atrocities of the Iraq War. My teachers liked me, I think, because they thought I was destined for a different path than my banking/lawyering/doctoring peers (I went to an expensive private school) because I liked to sing and wore eccentric printed dresses on days when we didn’t have to wear our uniforms.