Catch 22

Do you know what I think is ridiculous? Being successful, owning a home, getting married, having a lot of money, raising children, and being only twenty-two.

I think there was a time that when looking at that age I thought I would surely be a well rounded, successful adult with enough money to buy a house and have had enough time to have found a good man. And I think when I thought all that was when I was about fifteen. Now, a few weeks shy of turning twenty-six, I don’t think I have hardly anything together. I’m still making the same mistakes, doing all the wrong things, saying all the wrong things, entirely unable to afford my own life, my own apartment, and at this point, even get a date.

All of this and many more reasons is why I can’t in all honesty watch One Tree Hill anymore. Okay so I know I never write about anything like a show on the CW, but sitting there watching the tail end of this ridiculous drama, I didn’t realize exactly how ridiculous it was until one character blurted out that she was twenty-two. I almost fell off the couch. Never mind that the actors themselves are older than I am, but twenty-two? I started to panic.

Who at that age has their own magazine, owns a house/a clothing store/a business, is raising a seventeen-year old runaway, and is passing up offers from hot young men to come with them to LA? I’m pretty sure I can safely say that at twenty-two I was an emotional wreck, who had exactly no idea what I wanted to do with my life, was drinking far too much, and was continuously falling for all the wrong guys who never even asked me to go to dinner let alone follow them across the country (some things never change).

I suppose it’s nice in this economic, love and life recession I’ve found myself in over the past few years, (as my age creeps ever so slow further and further from twenty-two), to watch on television how my life could have turned out were I not living in the real world. But what’s so funny however, is that when the above mentioned twenty-two-year-old-success-story turns down the guy at the airport for reasons all viewers I’m sure couldn’t understand (I mean, did you see him?) the gentleman in question said, “You know, if this were a movie, all of this would be ending differently.”

So you see, he knows how I feel. If it were a movie, (or come to mention it my twenty-two year old life), she would have wrapped her arms around him and gone with him. Because there’s nothing like looking back on all that’s gone by and recognizing an opportunity you let pass you by because of obligations you weren’t even ready to make. You’re only young once (and getting older every second) and there’s time enough to figure it all out and find what defines your own success...after you make the choice to take a leap on to the symbolic plane of your life.

Because what tragedy it would have been had those emotional, drunken, aimless and confusing days of my twenty-two year old life never have happened - I’d hardly have been prepared at all for the last four years