She's All Growed Up!
...and other quotes that don't encompass coming of age in the 90s.
When I was young, my vision of myself as a 25-year-old included being married with two kids. I would live in a house like the one I grew up in and have one of those job things adults always complained about, along with a pink Trans-Am in the driveway. (Lindy West’s hilarious roast of Sixteen Candles here)
By the way, you’ll find my formula for links = free association + something funny.
This was very much what my mother’s life was like in her mid-20s; I identified with her heavily. Teachers often described me as “creative,” but apparently that trait was only for writing stories about talking trees and not to be applied to my future. It might seem quaint for an eight-year-old to aspire to be just like her parents, but that vision did not evolve as I got older. Where did that limited view of my future come from?
Be All You Can Be
My growing-up years were full of messages I just didn’t get.
“You can do anything you want to do!”
“You can be anything you want to be!”
“Just say NO!” (Don’t let your lame, pressure-y friends or the cartoon creepy dude in the car make you do drugs.)
These taglines were everywhere, and they seemed to be addressing problems I didn’t have or at least didn’t have yet. (dark humor post about depression, dead fish and addressing the wrong problems, by Allie Brosh)
I mean, okay, like thanks for the encouragement, but how do I figure out WHAT I want to do? How do I figure out WHO I want to be? (And also, what if I want to do some of the drugs??) None of it landed for me as useful advice.
“Have a goal,” they said, “Make a plan,” they said. They seemed to assume the goals came pre-packaged in my head, but when I opened my goal box, it was full of half-written poems and clips from Flashdance. I was sure that wasn’t what was supposed to be in there. I was kinda stuck.
Gen-X in Stereotype Purgatory
I feel like we Gen-Xers (Okay, maybe it’s just me, and I’m generalizing to make myself feel cozy.) didn’t get a ton of guidance. Overt misogyny was out, so we weren’t TOLD girls should aspire to be teachers or secretaries and that a boy who went to nursing school just couldn’t hack it as a doctor. But we still felt it.
I also felt pressure NOT to pick a career stereotypically reserved for women. There were a lot of conflicting messages, and none of the powers that be seemed to be able to iron those out for us.
Our Baby Boomer parents and teachers wanted us to “be whatever we wanted to be.” But they were raised in the same narrow idea of gendered and racial capitalistic success as their parents, so as much as they may have wanted to, they didn’t know how to show us that beyond vague, all-encompassing slogans.
It’s like the well-meaning impassioned coach who declares at half-time, “Play stronger! Go harder!” when his team could really use some specific “Here’s how you make a first down” pointers.
None of us had a framework for the brave new boundless world beyond housewives and jobhusbands that we all craved, that we were all trying to make.
“A Point in Every Direction Is No Point At All”
When I was finally pointed out into the world and told, “Go forth! Multiply, get a 401K and a mortgage!” that point in every direction caused me to fall back on my vague eight-year-old version of an adult future. It didn’t go as planned. Even my modest, unoriginal idea to have a couple of babies and move to the suburbs hit some serious black ice in the blizzard that is navigating marriage, parenting and finding a career I could tolerate.
Somewhere on that road, though, it began to occur to me that I didn’t have to have a nine-to-five that I only sort of hated. Maybe I didn’t have to be the poster child for feminism and find a “boy job” OR be a teacher. Maybe I didn’t have to convert my 90s angst into adult cynicism about the bullshit job market.
Maybe this murky yet enticing world of poetry and dance videos from my childhood could be a way of life, and I could take the messy culture I grew up with and be a part of making it more. More specific, more pointed, more inclusive, more creative. It took me until well into my 40s to figure this out, but I got there as fast as I could. Meaning I wandered around out in the career woods for twenty years first.
What was it you felt expected to do as an adult, even if no one explicitly told you? Where did that expectation come from? Where has it taken you now? Let us know in the comments.
Assignment
Imagine you’re in high school, and your teacher has written the following on the blackboard:
If you like This Is Not What I Expected, help an artist out and share it with a like-minded friend. Then, write five hundred words comparing and contrasting…(just kidding)