Chant & Rant of the 23

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” ---This Side of Paradise


So, I’m stuck in the year of my 23. The age where I don’t know what I want to do with my life. What I “want to be when I grow up.” The Pussycat Dolls have a song out titled, “When I Grow Up.” It’s on my ipod under the play list titled, “workout mix.” It’s listed as the first track. It used to get my blood racing, and helped me groove into the workout mood. I used to run the treadmill listening to it like it was the voice of a magic 8 ball (if they could talk) telling me everything would fall into place. And I believed it when the chorus sang, “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” Now, I skip over the track and start my run straight with Lady Gaga telling me to “just dance.” That if I lose my keys and my phone “it’ll be ok, so just dance.”

Yes, I work out. I work out only to bring the embers of burned calories back to life with beer and taco bell 14 hours later. Only, at 23, taco bell is labeled as: “taco hell.” At the age of 23, Taco Bell, on the way home from the bar, isn’t bragged about the same way I used to laugh about it the morning after a college frat party. At age of 23, Taco Bell is kept quiet, and frowned upon, to the point where immediately after consuming the mouth-watering crunch wrap supreme doused in fire sauce, I throw the wrapping in the trash and cover it with that big, empty box of Kashi cereal. So, in the morning, my roommate doesn’t know, and I can easily pretend that it never happened.

That’s another thing about being 23. There are more “on-purpose blackouts.”You remember, if you went to college parties, how you woke up the next morning and spent hours with your friends reliving all of the crazy things that went down the night before. Your remember the number of shots you had, the number of beers you stole that are now sitting, unopened and warm in your purse. You remember falling so many times, you can count the bruises on your knees; the bruises your best friend has on the same exact location of their knees because when you fell you dragged them down with you. And you remember the drunk texting and drunk dialing right? It’s so incredibly funny reading all of your inbox and sent texts aloud to your friends. Your hand is placed over your mouth as you try to hold back laughter, tears seeping from your eyes, and voicemails that are played over and over.

Well, at the 23, I can assure you that regardless of how drunk you are, you have the ability to erase all inbox and sent texts successfully. Including all the voicemails from the randoms (translation: random guys) you just gave your number to at the bar. Their voicemails go a little something like this, “Hey baby, just wanted to say it was so good to meet you tonight. You should have come back with me ‘cause we’re having after hours. I wish I was in your bed, baby, you’re so hot. Call you tomorrow baby. Dream of me naked.” Hold on, I have to vomit after typing that. No, I’m not exaggerating; boys really do leave that on my voicemail. It’s what happens after the business deal of earning your free vodka tonic in exchange for a phone number. It’s the only kind of business I currently engage in right now. I call it non-profit. Literally. The only thing that serves as compensation is the excruciating hangover the next morning. So. Not. Worth. It.

If I’m steady enough, I even manage to erase all of the bad pictures of me taken that very night. We do all of these things, ok wait, I do all of these things so that in the morning I don’t have to wake up to see that I drunk dialed my ex boyfriend 15 times in a row (yes it happened, and it happened multiple times). I call these memories the “on purpose blackout.” My friends and I all do it, and have been mastering it for the past year. We have to; otherwise we have to wake up to the shame. The shame that we haven’t “grown up,” we no longer can afford to act like “college kids,” and the reminder of how at 23, we’re just single, jobless women, trying to figure it out while no longer belonging to the college group, but not yet belonging to the group of 27 year old somethings looking for a husband. It’s a rut. It really is, and it’s frustrating as all hell.

----Excerpt from "I Couldn't Afford Therapy So I Had to Write this Book"