Tuesday, April 26, 2016

back to the drawing board

PC: Michelle Bongirno
At work, there is a floor to ceiling chalkboard and every day from 8 in the morning till about 8 at night children take chalk to its surface.

Layers upon layers of chalk, white-orange-pink-blue, dusts its surface until the layers of doodles and scribbles become pancaked on top of each other so much so it's hard to decipher the black of the board itself. Chalk dust that didn't quite stick has piled up onto the floor and on the hands and clothes of its artists.

And then we close, the children go home and maintenance comes to wipe it clean. All the labor and dreams spilled out on to its surface are scrubbed clean in one foul swoop, so that the next day another 12 hours of artistry can grace its plains.

In a half joking manner, I told my friend that I'm going to call this season of my post-college life the "back to the drawing board" phase, because, if anything, nothing has gone the way I planned or would have seen fit.

This job with the giant chalk board and the little Picassos, the one that was supposed to be a place holder until I landed my career job, is ending out of the blue. I'm being laid off at the end of the month. With a list of denials only growing longer by the day and being no closer to a job that requires my degree, I am left soon-to-be jobless without an option or a place to go.

When we heard the news, one of my coworkers looked at me with fear in her eyes and with terror-choked words she said, "What am I going to do?" There wasn't an answer. I had no advice, no understanding and no clue. All I could do was stare hard at her and see the reflection of myself in her eyes.

Being 20-something is very similar to having redeemed an E-ticket for the Hot Mess Express. You got onboard without fully comprehending the whole thing, but you were sold on the idea of going west in hopes for gold and your dreams.

Halfheartedly, I want to say I hate this part of my story. I want to raise that banner high and camp myself on one of those cramped benches on that train and write letters back home about all the horrible-rocky-uncertain-frustrating-confusing-daunting things about this season.

But, then I read quotes like this and I feel like these words are what my banner should actually read:

“Transition is a terribly uncomfortable place for you to be in your life. You will start hurting and not even understand where; you’ll think, I’ve never hurt like this before. I’ve never dealt with these kinds of problems. I’ve never been at this point in my life before.”

I'll be honest with you, I was afraid to call these feelings "hurt." It seems silly at first, doesn't it?

Hurt is a word we more often use to describe the bigger, bloodier, bolder problems -- not the bruises we attain by growing up. It makes me feel weak and unprepared to use it as a descriptor in this chapter of my story.

But, this is how I feel. And it isn't wrong or weird just because the world and all its fake-it-till-you-make-it bs says so. Or even because most adultier adults think you should be more joyful and less frazzled by the whole thing.

There is hurt while walking in this season and there is good too. It all goes hand in hand. To ignore the hurt would be silly and create an incomplete picture of what this season really looks like.

My letters home will continue to be filled with the hard and the confusing, but they'll also be the love letters of the now.

Sure, my chalk board has been scrubbed clean and my chalk is a little more crumbly and broken up than it was when I started. It's just the facts of my life right now.

Yet as I live in and through this season, I want to learn to be more like the little artists at work.

They have unrelenting and unashamed desires to still color when the board's been cleared and the chalk has run out. They don't rely on the chalk's permanence, because they know the lines they draw are easily undone. And even after days and weeks of asking, they continue to hold out hope for more chalk when the big box of colors has been all used up.

One day, I'll be lucky to be half as brave as them.
© Clarissa Doesn't Explain it All.
Maira Gall