Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Testing My Mettle.




To sum up the last few months of my life I invite you to imagine the cliche rollercoaster of emotions, along the way planting new gardens, being surprised by friends on my birthday, riding a scooter to the beach, taking my mother around the city, taking the train to a new office, and staying up all night to paint my new bedroom a beautiful shade of gray while singing Avett Brothers songs and thinking about how happy I am to be single.

Even though it takes a lot less time to paint a room with two people tackling it, I didn't have to compromise on the color or worry if I was going to offend my boyfriend by laying tape down too quickly or hurt his feelings by being finished before him. If there was one thing I could always tell bothered my boyfriend, it's how insensitively efficient I am.

Let's get real for a minute.

I'm sick of all this marriage talk.

My grandmothers didn't have Facebook when they were my age, so their mid-twenties weren't filled with hourly reminders that all of their friends were getting married and having chubby babies. They didn't have constant feeds of professionally photographed engagement announcements and status changes to make them question their personal happiness or life goals. No Pinterest boards to make them feel inadequate.

They were also both married at my age so this probably not a good rabbit trail to go down.

The point I'm trying to make is that I really need to stop using how close I am on a scale of 1 to 10 to being like all the women I grew up with as the metric for how happy I'm allowed to be.

Read: I'm not like them. I'm not married, I'm not getting married any time soon, and that means I'm also not going to have chubby babies any time soon. I also live in a handsome townhouse on Capitol Hill and drive by monuments every morning on my way to a job I adore. I have sweet, amazing girl friends and fun, happy boy friends.

Let me tell you what, there is nothing like being extremely close to getting exactly what you want to show you that it's absolutely not what you want whatsoever.