Recently, the New Yorker published a piece by Nathan Heller exploring the twisted, promising, hyper-confessional, neurotic reality of the twentysomething and society’s obsession with it. Upon reading this article The Gabbler’s Jessica Pierce took an honest inventory of her twenties thus far, unwinding her own life to figure out exactly how she became a blogging nanny living in the subtropics.
Five years ago, when I was 20, I thought that I was going to be an archaeologist. I was going to unlock the key to Incan laughter, uncover the sense of humor of an ancient people. Then I spent a summer at an archaeological dig in the northern Andes and I figured out pretty quickly that bones can’t exactly tell you their favorite jokes. Especially if the bones are from an animal and are probably actually just rocks covered in dirt.
Dreams of being the funny woman’s Indiana Jones were just the beginning of a long list that I’ve contemplated with various degrees of seriousness over the past five years. Grassroots organizer, project manager, technical writer, translator were all dreams I let see the light of day in real life job applications. At night, when my mind would run wild, I’d see myself as the next Jon Stewart, except not as hot (I’m alright-looking, but I’m pretty lacking in the nerdy, Jewish silver fox department, so there’s just no competition here).
My most concrete dream formed itself into a neat little five year plan: a gap year in Spain, a nice stint in the Peace Corps, a masters in applied anthropology with an emphasis in international development. I was going to change the world! And more importantly, I was going to put off applying for a real job for five more years. But in the most responsible way possible (The Peace Corps! Grad school! It was so respectable!).
I started off all right, settling into a cozy little Spanish town, Esparragosa de la Serena, working at the elementary school as an English Teaching Assistant. I spent my first night alone in the house I was renting, grinning like an idiot, singing and dancing. Hello world, I’ve arrived! I’m an adult! I support myself! Just look at this two bedroom home I’m renting for only 100 euros/month!
Unfortunately, though, my brain had other plans for my life. My neurons love to do this nifty little thing when I’m hungover and fire uncontrollably. Otherwise known as a seizure. After the sixth time I found my eyes blinking open from the floor, sore and confused, I figured it was time to give the Peace Corps a call and ‘fess up about my medical condition. Declared medically unfit to serve, I watched my carefully concocted five year plan disintegrate.
It was time to do the unthinkable: apply for a real job. So I got out my handy dandy resume guide, I logged onto Idealist, I wrote some cover letters and I sent my meager qualifications and my heart out into the world. For awhile I was excited. I could be anyone I wanted to be! Maybe I hadn’t given archaeology enough of a chance. Maybe somewhere, out there in the world there were bones who could tell me their favorite knock-knock joke!
Soon, as I sent out application after application into a black void that never even bothered to answer my follow up emails, my job search parameters widened to include “any job in any industry anywhere in the world that would take me and pay me enough to survive.” Eventually, these strict standards landed me a gig nannying for my aunt and uncle in Bermuda, world renowned for its beautiful beaches and non-existent income tax. Thanks to my college degree, I was able to very quickly learn the complexities of changing diapers and sweeping floors.
Now that I had my professional life totally in order and was living out my childhood dream of domestic servitude, I decided it was time for a real, adult relationship. Romance had too long taken a backseat to my unbridled ambition, but I was settled now, with a promise of an unprecedented year and a half of employment before I had to find another job. So I found a boy and I lost my heart to his beautiful smile and his strong arms. But I hoarded my feelings like precious jewels, forcing him to pry them from my lips with excessive promises until he left me, presumably for someone with a more open and sunny disposition. Overnight he became my worst nightmare made flesh.
Luckily, getting rejected from the Peace Corps and ending up a domestic servant in Bermuda after being unable to find anyone else in the world to employ me taught me that when God slams a door in your face, practically breaking your nose in the process, he opens a ventilation shaft, forcing you to slowly crawl your way to a better tomorrow that I’m sure I’ll find eventually, one day, in my 30s. So I just picked up the pieces of my heart littering the floor and shoved them right back into my chest where they belonged and moved right along. Which brings me to today, when I once again see the shining hope for a beautiful, fabulous somewhere in the distant future, beyond the bounds of a lonely, damp, cockroach infested apartment lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.
These are my experiences of being a so-called “twentysomething.” This is the only voice of my generation that I really understand, vacillating between hope and desolation, between unbridled confession and sarcastic distance, between absurd comedy and total heartbreak. I don’t claim to speak for everyone, just for those wandering that grey area, that lost space, somewhere between unemployment in a childhood bedroom and a stable career, starter home, and loving spouse. The ones who, totally unfulfilled by their menial jobs and their miserable love lives, are forced to turn to cyber space and create humor blogs, just so that they can carve out a small space in the world, build something, grin and say “look, that’s mine, I made that.”
Other generations may be confused by us, by our hipsters, our love of irony and sarcasm, our wanton chasing of heartache and adventure, our inflated egos and dreams of grandeur. Some may even be slightly awed by our easy way with technology, the way we crack open a world of opportunity from our laptops, sprawled on our unmade beds. Others are more critical, citing our narcissism, the slow turning inward in the face of so much possibility, the way we give in so easily to any opportunity to share and analyze and share and analyze our feelings again and again. They ask what new we have to offer, shake their heads at the idea that such a self-involved generation is the future, demand that we contribute more, that we build a new future for generations to come.
But we’re too busy just getting by, fueled by the endless shimmer of that big, bold future in the distance to concern ourselves with creating something for some snot-nosed teenager whose life revolves around her One Direction posters. We’re too busy failing to build anything.
In my own days as a snot-nosed teen, I had a particular fascination with Aesop Rock, a rapper who declared in the song “Daylight”:
“Life’s not a bitch. Life is a beautiful woman; you only call her a bitch because she won’t let you get that pussy.”
I think, more than anything, those lines sum up my worldview as a twentysomething barely getting by. I’m just trying to get that pussy.
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