Am I There Yet?: The Loop-de-loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood

by Mari Andrew

By moving to Washington, D.C., a few years after college, I said no to many alternate lives. I don’t obsess over them, but I do think about them from time to time. In fact, some day I would like to check in on these lives, then contentedly go back to my true life and enjoy all of it in its imperfect, surprising splendor.

it. The frustrating thing about making a choice is that you never know what the alternative would have been like; I can only squint to imagine what Other Me in San Francisco is doing while Real Me wilts in humid Washington, D.C.

This was the first time it occurred to me that I was not immortal, and the first time I realized just how much I enjoyed living. Not because of triumphs and trophies, but because of things like pressing elevator buttons, wearing a sweatshirt and making pancakes on Christmas morning, finding a seat on a crowded subway, reading on trains, whispering when there was no need to, and watching a cat clean his ears with his paw.

I’ve decided a tombstone that reads “Here lies Mari: She enjoyed herself” would be an extraordinarily fortunate accomplishment. From now on, my life lived will be my life’s work.

My last night I had exactly four euros left, and spent them on espresso at a French restaurant. People kept coming in from the rain, all sorts of interesting characters filling the barstools. I watched an older man sit down to do a crossword puzzle with blue ballpoint on smudged newspaper, his black bowler hat covering his gray, caterpillar-like eyebrows. Sipping from a mug heavy with whipped cream, he looked as content and comfortable in his life as he did at this bar. I pulled out my sketchbook and hoped I did, too.

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It’s the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again. It marries the feelings of happy wistfulness and poignant melancholy, anticipation, and hopelessness. It’s universally understood by a cross-ocean culture with a constant feeling of absence, a yearning for the return of something now gone.

When, after David Bowie died, many of my friends shared their nascent

awareness of mortality, I observed their revelation like they were a bunch of teenagers getting drunk on their first Bacardi while I sat back and sipped straight whiskey.

The ways we use the word habit in English are related; it originally meant dress, attire, and later came to denote an acquired behavior pattern. We still refer to a nun’s costume as a habit. Etymologically, a habit is what one has. Mourners may not wear fancy head coverings when someone dies anymore, but we carry our own markings around on public transportation, at work, at our desks at home. I am in mourning when I overreact to harsh words. I am in mourning when I learn a new song on the guitar. Mourning has become so hopelessly intertwined with my daily activities that I can’t separa...

What if it there was no universe-orchestrated happy ending, but just a continuation of some bad days and some good days? What if there were just seasons, and no eternal spring?

“Why wouldn’t I want to feel like that all the time?” is the question that began permeating every category of my life. Once I made a decision to make my apartment more colorful and therefore more “me,” I started making other seemingly small decisions that had a profound effect on my happiness: eliminating social events that felt like obligations, only doing exercise that didn’t feel like punishment, and playing around with my skin care routine so it felt more like a treat (than a chore) at the end of the day.

Show up with stories to tell. Your whole life prepares you for the big moments, so go in confidently knowing you have years of experience to your name. This goes for interviews, dates, or any important conversations. It’s ultimately about whether they’re a fit for you than you a fit for them, so be funny and self-assured and wear hot pink if you feel like it. Don’t hide the fact that your favorite sport is bocce ball and you’re currently binge-watching Golden Girls.