Mission

SOME DAYS I BERATE myself for being so young, and feeling so young, and wanting to do young things. I am, after all, twenty-two. When my parents were my age they had settled together and began to plan a family, buy a house, set their eyes on future comings and responsibilities. They were two honest, modest young people with love and good intentions. And coming behind them, I saw myself on the same trail.

The path they took eventually lead them to where they are, and gradually, steered me to where I am: realizing that it’s too late for me to take that path. I’ll never be married as young as my parents (22 and 21, respectively), have a child at the same age my mom had her first (24), trading in the car for a minivan. Their lives had long been the stencil for my life, as I set my sights on guys as young as junior high, planning future forever after 9th grade. Options were nonexistent.

Now that I’m twenty-two and I still feel young (and too, näive) I’ve found my recipe is not the same as my parents’ model. While I respect and honor every step they’ve taken, and owe my utmost gratitude to them, I know my future will unroll quite dissimilarly. I’ve shattered my illusions—and perhaps theirs, too—of where I’m going.

It has always been the greatest disappointment to me that I haven’t found my other half. It has always troubled me, deeply, that I could never keep up a relationship as I’ve watched others advance. And it’s always surprised me that when I’m honest with myself—truly truthful—being with someone was never what I needed. Not until I meet myself.

Being in California has me on a kick, to keep rolling along in a future I feel is right for me. I hope to travel straight to my thirties, and if lifestyle allows, if I still feel young, to keep on moving. I want to live abroad before I get married, to spend time volunteering, to have an atypical lifeway, to drive across a country, to feel absolutely scared and exhausted and liberated and lonesome—a whole gamut of emotions that I can view in retrospect as the greatest moments of my youth. I want to feel that I’ve served justice to my intentions. And eventually, when love permits, I will alight.

What’s more is, there is no stencil for any of it.