As college becomes an increasingly blurry memory, and my 22nd birthday approaches, and “adulthood” continues to fly at me with uncontrollable speed—I find myself in the mood to make a list. I love lists, and think there is nothing more gratifying than crossing something off of a list. Laundry done? Cross it out. Event attended? Cross it out. Deadline met? Cross that shit OUT.

I’ve seen 25 before 25-esque lists floating around the blogsphere. Reading other people’s goals, both big and small, has got me to thinking about what my goals are lately. I’ve always been a goal-oriented person, a planner, constantly grappling with my inherent need to plan out every moment of my day, week, year…to ensure its maximum satisfaction and to minimize boredom.

But I’d be lying if I told you post-grad hasn’t felt a little directionless! Not in a way that’s necessarily bad. It has felt nice to just sort of sit back and let life handle it for a while. But I don’t want to steer too far off course. I don’t want to lose my sense of urgency in regards to what it is that I’m trying to do with this little life I have been given. So what are 25 things I want to get done before I turn 25? I have a solid 3 years to do this, so I’ll mix up lofty goals with simpler ones. (I suggest you write your list, too!)
 

My 25 before 25:

1. Start a graduate program. (As of right now, I’d love that program to be a writing MFA.)

2. Find an artistic community to call home in NYC. (Or, perhaps, in whatever city I end up in if it’s not NYC in the next few years.)

3. Plant a garden. (I want to grow my own veggies, and flowers, and have it be robust and beautiful!)

4. Celebrate my first-ever two and three year anniversaries with my love. 

5. Get something I wrote up and on its feet in NYC. (I really want to bring all that Michigan-centric production luck over to the east coast…)

6. Travel up & down the west coast—Seattle, Portland, San Fran. (I’ve been to LA and loved it…I’m afraid once I get to the Pacific Northwest I’ll never want to leave, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.)

7. Document life through photos, more. (I mean, something beyond my iPhone. I want solid, real life photographs that I can hold or use as a bookmark or tack on my wall. My beautiful friend Gracie takes a disposable camera with her everywhere she goes, and therefore has a myriad of sentimental, hardcopy photos.)

8. Make a personal website. (I’m talking like, an actual website. Something beyond this blog with the crappy layout. Something to convince people I am a very serious “professional.”)

9. Get headshots. (I’ve never gotten them before. I figure I am going to need them at some point if I’m trying to be a writer. Also, a professional photoshoot would be fun.)

10. Learn a new skill. (I’m not sure what that skill is yet. Perhaps I’ll perfect knitting, or learn to play a musical instrument, or how to build things. The skill will find me, I hope.)

11. Make a new close friend. (I’ve got so many wonderful friends, with bests in every category—Canadian, gay, high school, college—but there is always room for more. Especially one in the city I live in.)

12. Confront and solve an interpersonal problem head-on. (I don’t mean in an aggressive way, but in a way that is direct and through person-to-person communication. I can be an awful communicator sometimes—I let things fester, bubble up, and blow over without really ever finding resolution outside of dissipation. I don’t like this! Let’s tackle something outside of text or Facebook messaging.)

13. Get into exercising. (I so often go on a three-day exercise kick and call it a justification for a muffin every morning for the next month. Pretty soon I’ll be hitting that wall where the things you eat actually do show up on your thighs, and I want to be prepared for it by being able to jog longer than 30 seconds.)

14. Develop a new interest. (I’ve already got some weird interests up my sleeve, but I’d love to expand my horizons by adding to them. Comic books? The state of the economy? 80s teen movies? I’ll find something to love.)

15. Go dark again. (I’ve been such a committed blonde for over a year now! —For those of you who know me and my rapidly-changing hair personalities, you know that this is a personal achievement in itself. But now that I love the blonde, and feel like I identify with the blonde, I feel I lack the old edge I used to have—the girl who would chop off 12 inches of hair on a whim at the mall. Let’s get her back. We’ll take this hair crazy places before 25.)

16. Have another excursion abroad. (It’s been well over a year since my brief stint in Russia, and it still remains one of the most formative experiences of my life. I’m not saying that you have to travel overseas to find yourself, but it doesn’t hurt. Especially for someone like me. I’d like to disappear in the coffee shops of Prague or the hillsides of Ireland for a while.)

17. Create a (near) perfect home. (I’ve lived in a lot of different places the past 5 years, and not one of them has reached even close to perfection potential. I always move in to new places with plans and ideas for what I want it to look like and what I want to have there—but those dreams fizzle out shortly after unpacking. I’d love to find a place where I can hunker down for a while, probably in NYC, that I can make a real home without having to worry about moving.)

18. Write a screenplay.

19. Write an original TV pilot.

20. Find a writer’s group. (Similar to number two…oh well :) )

21. Find near-one-hundred-percent comfort in who I am and what I want. (This one is hard because I know that this is something that most people never come to…because, well, we’re human. We’re always learning and evolving and changing our mind. But by 25, I’d like to feel just a little less schizophrenic. It’s something to always be actively working toward.)

22. Get something published by a widely-read publication. 

23. Read and finish twenty books. (I always buy books and never find the time to finish them. We will find the time!)

24. Write in my journal more regularly. (I always feel much better after regurgitating the day’s thoughts into my journal. So I don’t know why it only happens once or twice a month when everything has reached the boiling point. Let’s have a goal of three entires a week.)

25. Go berry picking and make jam. (This is something I have always wanted to do. I should have gotten into it when I lived in the Midwest and there were berry fields abound, but alas. It’s on the list.)

So there it is, folks. My 25 before 25. I will keep you posted on my progress. Join me in making a list of your personal goals!

xx
Em 

The longer I live in New York, the more I realize how proud I am of my Midwestern roots. Which is somewhat ironic, coming from the girl who spent the majority of her formative years scribbling down anthems of teen angst in a composition notebook (“WHEN I TURN 18 I’M MOVING TO CALIFORNIA!!!”) and cursing the damn-ed boring-ness of my stupid hometown in my stupid flyover state.

(Sidenote: composition notebooks were the “it” notebook before the Moleskine took over.)

But now, as I experience the most pathetic autumn of my life in a city of concrete (The difference between summer and fall in NYC? 35 degrees. End of comparison.), even a fleeting thought of autumn in the Midwest sends me on a downward spiral of nostalgic tweak-outs. The thought of sitting by a fireplace, drinking chai tea and reading a book yanks on my heart strings so hard I get palpitations. And the thing is, I’m not so sure that these are things I even did that often. 

Here’s the thing: nostalgia is a goddamn bitch. She comes around and has you missing all these things that, when you actually had them, were just the same ol’ grind to be resented. But now, I stare out my window on a rainy day in Brooklyn thinking: Anything to be 17, driving in my crappy car to the only crappy record store in town, latte in hand, best friend in the driver’s seat, mutual dreaming about all the possibilities of the world…

Well, let me tell you, being “in” that world is so much less romantic. Because even though I didn’t turn 18 and move to California, I did turn 21 and move to New York City, which seems equally appropriate. And in the blissful world I dreamed up as a starry-eyed teen, I neglected to consider things like—bills, and life, and adulthood, and responsibility, and pressure, and expensive bar tabs, and oh you want to be a writer? Are you retarded?

But here is the other thing. Maybe being a writer in New York City is the most romantic thing of all, because you get to experience nostalgia. Perhaps, nostalgia for the Midwest is much more romantic and special than going back and…what? Enjoying the smell of the leaves for one day and then becoming bored out of my mind the next day? Subscribing to a townie fate? I guess in that scenario, I would have dreams instead of nostalgia…but I have to think that dreaming in that way gets exhausting after a while. Nostalgia is powerful, and that power can be terrible…but perhaps it’s better than the alternative. Because I’ll fulfill these nostalgic impulses for 10 days over the holiday, when I gather at home-base with the siblings, and I’ll feel so fulfilled and so happy and when it’s all said and done…so ready to get back to New York City. 

Either way, I want a goddamn Bell’s Amber and my mom. Right. Now.

Happy Friday!

Who would have thought that adulthood (“adulthood”) would be even more bipolar and confusing than those later-days of middle school? I thought my days of feeling like a gangly, awkward, misplaced dreamer were done when I stopped wearing those stretchy bubble shirts. What the frack, bro?

But seriously though. My adult, aka post-graduate-first-real-job, existence has been going on for only approximately 4-5 months and I already know that I know absolutely nothing at all. All of those “challenges,” both personally and professionally, that I overcame throughout my adolescence and collegiate years, which felt so character-affirming, are now more like little baby bumps on the radar when compared to where I stand now. Nothing but a big, black abyss of uncertainty ahead of me.

This all sounds so dramatic and depressing! I assure you it’s not. It’s actually really exciting (nauseating, but mostly exciting). It’s just like, no matter how smart or sure of myself or whatever I thought I was…it’s all been completely challenged and flipped on its head since I’ve moved to New York. It’s a new plane of existence, of understanding who I am as a person—or attempting to. And it’s totally awesome and exciting and…okay, maybe a little paralyzing.

I feel like I’ve passed all the milestones in my life that I could have feasibly prepared for, or rather planned for. Now that I’m passed these said milestones, aka going to college and landing some sort of job, I’ve realized that the rest is on me. The rest of my life is mine to invent. There’s no right way to do it, there’s no one to tell me what I want, there’s no school-like structure forcing me to categorize myself socially, there’s no playwriting professor asking me for pages, there’s no mom telling me to wear my seat belt or brush my teeth or to make good choices. The rest of this life is all on me, and that’s somewhat terrifying. Because once you realize it’s all on you, and there’s no one there to force you to do anything…you have to pick what you want. What makes you happy. You gotta do what feels good, feels right, something to get you outta bed in the morning. What have I realized? My lazy butt feels that laying around watching 30 Rock with a beer is the right thing to do 87% of the time. Needless to say, I’m embracing the transition period. A good friend told me I have a solid 7 years before “adulthood” becomes adulthood, and I’m solid with that.

The good news is, I’m super happy, I’m in love, it’s fall in New York City, I got a good haircut for once, my job rocks, I’m not in poverty (yet), and that big black abyss is actually a swirling pool of lovely possibility—I’m just trying to work out where I fit in this new phase.

Love,

E(xistential crisis)mma