tam: our parents are like kryptonite

david:  mmhmmand you know what that means

we’re super

The economic collapse has ushered in what a lot of my friends from childhood have affectionately dubbed “our second adolescence.” We’re back in high school, only we don’t have that very tangible goal of college as an escape route. Friends are back home in southern California, from faraway places (Chicago, for example), trying to remember that this is temporary. I am trying to think of it as subletting someone else’s life for awhile. These are atypical times we’re living in, and even though it feels like we’re netting a negative number in terms of our life scores/credit scores at the moment, perhaps this is just a reminder from the Universe that we really are indomitable and more resilient than the rest.

Everything we have accomplished, we have earned. Honestly and with grit and determination, even though others told us we were crazy and different and we knew we wanted something more than what our hometowns had to offer. We would not be the same people without the environment in which we grew up, home to the oldest existing and operating McDonald’s, a town where I’d strategically map out how to run/walk four miles home from high school drumline and band practice before it got too dark due to sketchy neighborhoods, where you were a success if you graduated and got yourself to college — any sort of college, let alone a four-year university where you lived on campus. Where the schools didn’t have enough money for classroom and take-home sets of books, so we’d lug them in backpacks and carried them and asked teachers to let us stow them somewhere because our school didn’t allow lockers (it was a liability).

A lot of us lost our homes when parents decided to move, or lost houses due to foreclosure, or families collapsed due to pressure and drama and this buzzing confusion we call Life. But being bitter about what we lost isn’t going to get us closer to what we want or need.

We’re still looking for our homes. We’ll get there.