As I stared out of my window and looked out at another #hungover Saturday morning in the Ghetto, I had a very sudden realization. Out of all the problems in the world, I had to admit, being twenty in Montreal – yeah, THIS city – was going to be so tough.
It’s like, what am I going to do with my life from here? My overly entitled years as a teenager are coming to an end. But what comes next? It’s just so worrisome. School feels like a trap, like I’m 2007 Britney Spears, shaved head, waiting to get out of her car and face the paparazzi. What will I do? I want to write, but, beyond the occasional MeCock’s Thought Catalog rip-off, what else is there to do? The Twice-A-Weekly? Ugh, so #controversial. I couldn’t. But who will be able to hear my unique voice in these trying times for millennial twenty-somethings?
My life on campus feels like a show on syndication – repeats over and over again. The same people you had that embarrassing one-night stand with at the same Sucka Frees, your same roommate quibbles, your same boring Poli Sci conferences. Where’s the excitement that countless college movies promised me would come? Even my attempts to get spotted on campus in another fantastic outfit come in vain; if you wear a beautiful scarf, jacket, and boots combo (I matched the leather!), and MeCock’s doesn’t spot it, did I ever even wear it? I come home after a long day of looking so put together and fall apart once I get home, my taken-off clothes a pile of unmet expectations. Will this be my twenties?
And, ugh, sigh at my love life. Where’s my partner that will lovingly stroke me to sleep during the cold winter months of my twenties? It’s like the more and more I watch When Harry Met Sally or The Notebook the less and less chance I find my own Ryan Gosling (#LOL, not Billy Crystal, amirite?). I look around the Ghetto and see guys in puke suits which is fun, but, you know, long term? No.
I’m halfway through school but like, it’s so dark (these winters are so dark!) and I can’t see anything on the horizon. I know it’s somewhat pretentious to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald (American Lit what what) but I feel like the man in the rowboat, beating on against the current, back borne ceaselessly into the past. I feel like that sentence will define me better than any attempt I’d ever make at writing something, but then again, I still have this urge to write. Unfortunate, right? It can only get worse.
Maybe I’m never growing up, never moving past this teenage angst, these feelings. Like I’m in permafreeze during my twenties. I’ll still watch Spongebob and the Rugrats and go to increasingly ironic nineties nights just to feel at home. I’ll have to figure out a job (oops to my unemployable degree) and my love life and new friends, maybe a new place. Making mistakes. It may be a cliché, but: I’ll take it one day at a time.