Inspired by @nathanveshecco
I am 20 + six months.
I have been married for almost a year.
Consequently I feel both much more grown up than my old friends and hopelessly un-grown-up.
I work at CompUSA ostensibly selling Macintosh computers but really mostly providing lots of support and advice to regular customers while doing a terrible job actually “upselling” or “closing” or all the other stuff good salespeople do that I’m terrible at. I worry that I don’t do a good job. I wonder if I’ll ever be good at anything.
I am a student. I study Psychology. I recently started community college after flunking out of college my freshman year and taking a year off. There is a pervasive back-of-the-mind terror that I will be a “failure” although I’m not self-aware enough to think of it in those terms.
My wife is my savior. She is kind and fun and funny and energetic and smart and dedicated and inspiring and most importantly she loves me deeply and I know it. I know it. I am doing better in school this time around mostly because I want to do well for her. I don’t want her to have put her trust in me foolishly.
People are starting to make fun of the way I talk. I will say “gracious” as an exclamation at work and one of my coworkers will say I talk like an old lady, getting a laugh. Shortly after a waitress will ask how I’m doing and when I say “quite fine thank you” she will say “Oh quite quite! Oh indeed!” while patting her chest, and then laugh.
Toy Story will come out. I have a friend who is studying 3D design and animation and he will tell me it is revolutionary. I will not watch it for several more years because I think I am too erudite for cartoons. He was right.
I will switch majors back to computer science.
I will help a man with a computer problem and he will compliment me graciously. He will give me his business card as a senior manager at McDonnell Douglas working on rotor-wing aircraft. He will tell me to call him and come see the facilities and meet some of the programmer staff. Foolishly, I will never call because I don’t want to be a burden.
I will pick up a novel for the first time in a coupe of years. Almost the first time ever by my own volition. Les Miserables. It will change my life in some small way, like a slight bending of the trajectory of a comet, almost imperceptible when it happens but totally changing where it ends up a thousand years later.
My brother will have the first of his significant legal problems. We will begin the long slow inexorable drifting apart.
I will be happy.
I will be sad.
But mostly I will not believe in myself much. That will come several years later.
But I will push on, keep trying, and mostly do the right stuff.
This reminds me of a story I heard once from a religious leader about his particular version of struggle, illustrated by a day with a car broken down on the highway and a young family barely making it. He said years later he drove down the same road and imagined he saw himself walking along and “his hands did hang down.” He spoke to the apparition.
“Don’t you give up, boy. Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead—a lot of it—30 years of it now, and still counting. You keep your chin up. It will be all right in the end. Trust in God and…
…believe in good things to come."
They came. They keep coming.