292. This is Your Life, Too

Nora takes us back to a moment in college when she imagined what her life as an adult would look like. 

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

Nora: I don’t have a lot of solid memories from college,  probably because I spent most of those four years just pickling myself in a brine of cheap beer and shame.  And because on more than one occasion I woke up concussed on the floor of a bar after simply falling down drunk.  with only the sticky, rotting wood floor to  soften the blow of my head hitting it.

But I do remember sitting in the living room  of our rental house, 1928 Klenae, in Norwood, Ohio, on a warm day in May 2005 with my roommate Erin. It was almost finals week, which meant we were nearly to the end of our college experience. And whoa! Were we overwhelmed?  We had papers to write. We had exams to take.

We had books to sell back to the bookstore for beer money. We had an entire house of mostly broken furniture to empty out before we set off to wherever and whatever was next.  And we’re sitting there overwhelmed and Erin says something like, I can’t wait to be done with college and just have a job. Like, no homework and a job.

Just a job. And I’m nodding like, yeah, just think of all the free time we’ll have. Yeah, totally.  This is where you could just insert a hearty LOL because these little sweet dummies thought adulthood would be better than, uh, College. And  we thought it would be less stressful, but we only ever know what we know.

And Erin and I both knew very, very little about adulthood. We paid 300 a month each for a room in a dilapidated house that we mostly used for sleeping and partying. The bathroom tub had never once fully drained. And we just regularly showered in several inches of each other’s filth. We didn’t think of it that way.

We didn’t think of it that way. We were like, ooh, a little leftover water. We did think that adulthood would be easier than college. We did think that we would simply go to work, do the work, leave our work at our desk. We each had a flip thumb. We, we barely texted. Texting was extra. We hardly ever checked our email.

We could not have conceived of the girl bossery to come. The ways in which we would make work into our lives and stoke the fires of our own burnout.  I thought on that day and on many others that I was in a waiting room,  that soon a door would open and a woman, always a woman, always a woman with a clipboard would call my name and usher me across a threshold where my actual life, my real life was waiting.

I was simply in a practice round called college or high school or new adulthood. Someday, my life would arrive. Someday, it would begin. And I cannot time travel, but if I could, I would go tell that version of me that her life had already begun.  And that it was happening. Right then and there. in that filthy living room.

And she would probably say, What? First of all, who are you? Second of all, what is going on? What life? What about this matters? And I would say, everything.  I would say, all of it.  The sound of your roommate singing along to a brand new band called Maroon 5  on her 3 disc changer, the mattress and box spring that you inherited from the last girl who lived in this crooked little attic room with the window that wouldn’t stay open,  Miss Murphy’s wide wailed corduroys in Kelly Green and the fact that she taught you the Cornell method of note taking in 7th grade,  writing thinly veiled erotic fanfic about your teachers in middle school with your best friends whose landlines you can still recite from memory.

If I ever have to time travel, I’ll be fine because I can call Aaron Mulcahy or Kara Shannon on their landlines and talk to their parents, and their parents will help me.  It all matters. Wasting billable hours. Updating your MySpace at a job you barely tolerate that barely tolerates you back, waiting for your boss to leave for the day so you can just power down your desktop computer and then go drink 3 margaritas and five, eat 5 burritos with your roommates,  wasting valuable hours of sleep,  laying in bed just checking your flip phone repeatedly to see if that guy ever called, which of course he didn’t.

The boredom. The stress.  This is your life too.  Most of us, many of us might still be waiting for our real lives to begin,  to appear before us fully formed and ready to play, no assembly required. We might be waiting to reach a destination that will feel like something.  But we’re here now,  wherever we are, with whatever we have.

I will never again be 22 and able to survive on one hour sleep. a few Red Bulls, and some Camel Lights, which they were free at the bar, which was so strange. Ohio in 2003 to 5 was an odd destination. I will never again be 41, telling my sweaty children that it’s not that hot. It really is that hot. And that we’ll turn on the air when it’s hot, hot.

Again, it’s hot. It’s already hot. Why am I like this?  There is not some secret code. Some unknown level of expertise we will unlock where it all makes sense, where real life kicks in.  This is your life.  Whatever it looks like, whatever it feels like, however it does or does not measure up to the expectations you had when you were younger and sweeter and undoubtedly dumber in many ways and smarter and many others.

There is more to come.  There’s motor There’s more to come. There’s more to hope for. You  There is more to wait for,  but there is plenty here already,  and this is your life, too.  I’m Nora McInerny.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to be okay.  If you have an okay thing that you want to share with us, the instructions are in our show description.

We are an independent podcast made by Feelings Co. A little independent company of amazing people like Claire McInerny, who produced this episode? Amanda Romani, who mixed it. Marcel Malekebu, our MVP Grace Berry. Also a vp and also me, also a P. I’m a P.  Uh, our theme music is by secret audio, and I think those are all the things that I need to say.