Whoa.
Holy time warp Batman.
It's March, and I'm 21 now. My first 8-week sub term came to an end Friday, and much to my surprise, I got all my assignments in and finished my last tests strong. I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I've been working a lot more at the cafe since Emma has been gone, and before she went on vacation, once a week I was losing a day I'd devoted to school by "helping out" (um, getting paid, duh—I'm not a saint) and babysitting four little munchkins while their much older sister was in Uganda on a mission trip. Between work and school, I've felt more jammed then I have in a long while. Any spare moment has been filled with this one hobby, running. I've flirted with it since I was 15, but ever since early autumn we've been going steady and despite (dare I say, because of?) a wicked cold winter, it's only gotten more serious.
I'm a little tired. The busyness gets to my head, and then stresses me out and makes me slightly overwrought because I begin to question my priorities & lifestyle, particularly as they relate to other people, but in all areas.
See, I have these expectations of what my life—social, academic, work or church life, you name it—should look like. As I watch myself trying to fill the shoes of the life I conceive I should be living, I get depressed.
I'm not on a college campus, surrounded by other students. When I have some inkling of time-off, I'm not hanging out with friends. I haven't helped out with the church building/restoration project—heck, I haven't even seen the building yet, I'm so six-feet-under in "other things." I shouldn't be as dependent as I am and my living situation is weird. Also, I still have qualms about being a waitress. It's humbling, especially considering the end of the day finds me asking my boss if I mopped the floor good 'nough, not reporting a patient's symptoms to a doctor and offering my opinion of treatment, like my 17-year-old self was doing.
However, just because what I am actually doing is different from all my expectations...does that make my life wrong somehow?
I'm learning (hoping? wishing?) the answer is no. Different isn't necessarily worse. It just takes a little extra time to get it into a mental framework.
Case in point is my 20th birthday, the day in Bologna that I didn't write about on my blog because I really didn't know how to. At the time, I said the day was great, to reassure my mom.
I spoke truth: it was a great day. However, it was great for a reason I wasn't expecting. Namely, we had a misadventure. My birthday dawned bright and clear. We briskly walked to the train station, Alps behind us, sun rising gently up from the vineyards in front of us, warming the clean, cool air. A couple hours into our train ride, it started snowing. Caitlin said it stayed sunny in San Lorenzo all day. By the time we got to Bologna, it was gray and shivery. There were lots of people, crowded, suspicious markets, political demonstrations and performances of various kinds that we couldn't even wrap our minds around (men in dresses? Adele?). The oldest university in the world wasn't that impressive, most of the churches we tried to go in were closed, and there was lots of dirt and graffiti. Near the end of the day, we wearily (unfortunately not warily) stumbled into a classy bar tucked back on the 3rd floor of a bookstore and ordered some kind of food off the Italian menu from a bartender who spoke only Italian (why on earth did that man speak only his native language?). Then, thoroughly at a loss as to what to do or even think, we hopped on the train and headed home. I was never so glad to see Beth and Leo.
It wasn't a European fairytale 20th birthday. Wasn't the one I'd imagined.
At all.
But I did have some really good gelato. And prosecco. And friends who kept me laughing all day.
In its imperfection, despite its differentness and the fact that I couldn't readily wrap my mind around it, it was perfect.
In that way, then, my 21st birthday in NY was remarkably similar to my 20th in Italy. I had some ideas of what I'd like my 21st to look like, but knew they were impractical because of expense and not even having time to break away from school for more than an afternoon. So Mom and Dad surprised me by having Chip&Colleen and Iris&Henry over for soup and my favorite cake before heading up the road to Scott's winery, Barnstormer, for a tasting. It was a short, sweet celebration on a gray, snowy day. Nothing like the birthday I'd imagined. But perfect, because of the people I spent it with. Even if they weren't my peers, they are four adults I'd very much like to be like as I keep growing up, and celebrating with them was an honor.
Not to mention, they asked questions and let me talk about Italy a lot, and my future plans. I find myself needing to do that frequently, because I'm trying to figure out what to do, and not let expectations I put on myself steal the joy of being alive. And how to balance maintaining relationships with family and friends while forging ahead in my own life.
I do have friends, I'm just finding them in "unusual" places, like in adults who are older than me, or in my coworkers, or in letters and Skype sessions from states away. I don't have a cool job, but it's steady, with the potential for meaningful interactions with the locals who come in every day, and with my coworkers and bosses. I don't get to go to campus with my peers, but the online community is a real community, and there's a lot to learn from the variety of demographics represented in the student body. I am involved in church, just not the building part of it.
So die, expectations, die. Live in the spirit of Bologna.
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