272. If You’re Miserable Right Now

Nora was recently on a college campus and was flooded with nostalgia for the “good ol days”. But once she started talking to students, she realized being on the brink of adulthood is a tougher chapter than she remembered. 

All this week on IGTBO we are sharing advice for graduates and young people about to embark on the next chapter of their lives. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: Nostalgia is such a funny thing, isn’t it? We place rose-colored glasses on our faces, smear them with Vaseline, pad the sharper edges of our histories for our emotional safety.

Ah, we say, it was just so simple.

But was it?

Really?

This week I spent some time with students at a prestigious university; talking to and with them about loss and grief and life in general.

I walked onto the campus and felt a ghost pang for my college backpack, loaded down with actual books, a giant Nalgene water bottle, and at least five different notebooks. Look at all these young people with their lives unfurling like perfect little ferns, unaware of their beauty, their freedom, their relative innocence.

Take me back! I thought!

Near the end of our time, one girl — quiet, bespectacled, glowing in the way that you can only glow when your collagen production is at an all-time high —raised her hand to say she had a simple question.

She tells the group that she far from her home and her mother, who are on the opposite side of the planet. Her mother wants updates, photos, proof that her daughter is Taking Full Advantage of Her Opportunities. That she is Making The Most Of It. That she is happy, driven, having the time of her life and also getting the grades and accolades expected of her.

But it’s hard. Everyone else seems so busy and so happy. They all have plans — big plans! And she doesn’t know if her plans are the right one or if she’s doing the right things.

Fat tears ran silently from her eyes, pooling at the space where her glasses met her perfect cheeks. And then, her simple question: How do you know if you’re living your life for you? 

Oh, honey. I said

Are you miserable?

Nods. Tears.

I joined a chorus of women in the room in assuring her that she was not alone in that misery, that she is living in an overwhelming time in an overwhelming situation, doing things that are brave and difficult and isolating. That even the best of mothers can’t help but project our unrealized dreams onto our brilliant, shiny daughters. That 19 is young — so young! — and anyone who believes they have it all figured out at that age is most likely very, very, wrong.

I was told at many ages — high school, college, new adulthood, newlywed, new motherhood — that I was in the best years of my life. And though I have good memories and good photos from all of these ages, if I take off the rose-colored glasses, things were never as simple or sweet or perfect as I want to remember them.

I went to high school as a six-foot tall pencil with braces, insecure and out of place in my body and my mind. I went to college lost and alone and afraid, unable to even walk into the cafeteria alone without my brain telling me that everyone was looking at me and thinking about what a loser I am. Revisiting any journal from my life will reinforce that I have lived a life driven by anxiety, the emotional white noise of my existence.

My father used to say that youth is wasted on the young, but I don’t think that’s a folly of youth, but of the formerly young who have created unrealistic expectations based on hazy memory.

And so, a note to our younger and current selves:

These are not the best days of your life, they are simply days of your life. You will have so many of them (God willing), and most of them will be utterly forgettable and blessedly boring. 

You have lives ahead of you that you can’t even imagine, friendships and foibles and horrors and joys you cannot even imagine even if you are a liberal arts major with minor in Imagination Studies. 

You will live for yourself, for your mother, for people you have yet to meet and people who are just an imaginary gallery in your head. 

You do not have to Make The Most of anything, do not have to rise to every occasion and emerge the victor, holding life by the hair. 

You are already good and worthy and holy, even when you’re lost or sad, angry or stupid. 

Today is miserable? Let it be. Tomorrow you start again.