Hi! I don't follow you and in fact never saw your username before today, but I stumbled upon this post and I just had to say that you may be the coolest person alive. What an incredible assortment of experiences!
https://www.tumblr.com/cazort/786154312079491076/things-i-had-experienced-by-the-age-of-26-taught?source=share
Aww thank you! This is a very flattering ask.
I definitely do not feel like the "coolest person alive" haha I have always thought of myself as definitively "uncool", like from my passion for public transit which is widely considered "unsexy" in our society, to my bumbling and stumbling in the job market and taking a decisively non-traditional path through.
Like that post makes it sound cool, and yes, I DO think I took on a lot of responsibilities.
But at the time I really felt like I was struggling.
My muffin adventures were when I graduated high school and felt I wasn't ready for college yet, so I took a year off. I worked in a bakery and then on the side I did the music stuff with getting the ensemble together.
So like...it really was a really cool thing to do.
But at the same time, society didn't see it as "cool". It was like all my peers went off to college and I was left with a fractured friend group, only a few younger friends still around who were in their senior or junior year of high school, and they were in a pretty different world from me. My parents supported me and the bakery where I worked was really supportive, but I got a lot of sort of puzzled looks and mild disapproval from people who thought I would "lose momentum" before going to college.
And then later, I graduated college in the wake of the tech bubble, the economy was in shambles, and I had one failed job application and the occasional interview, after another. I got a dead-end part-time accounting job that sucked incredibly, it was in a suburban office park in the middle of nowhere, working in a room with dark grey walls and no windows. Then I stumbled onto my part-time job as tax preparer...and that's where I got the idea of running my own business. I saw other people, whose taxes I was doing when they walked in off the street, running successful businesses freelancing.
And I thought, there are a lot of people who need work done, but don't have enough money to hire a full-time person. So that's how I got into that.
Anyways, after a few years in the working world, I went back to grad school just because I was so damned lonely and I desperately wanted to get back into a college campus / university environment because that was the last time in my life that I had felt truly happy in a sustained way, and truly felt a sense of community and had a peer group and friends.
I love all the experiences I had, looking back, but it was a rough life. I was depressed, sometimes severely. It had its bright moments and I had my accomplishments where I shined, where I stepped up and did impressive things.
I think this is why that first post made me so mad (i.e. the OP in it, I loved the responses to it). Like the big bad thing during that time in my life, the years leading up to about age 26, was loneliness. I was so terribly heart-wrenchingly lonely so much of the time.
And then someone is coming in and implying that it is somehow bad and wrong for a 32-year-old to associate with a 26-year-old? I just want to strangle them. I want to strangle them with all the despair and pain I felt during those same years, those years where I was struggling to find any sort of peer group, friend group.
And part of why I was struggling? It was specifically because I had been raised with the idea that I needed to associate with people my own age, "peers". But the whole concept of "peers" is silly and becomes really broad.
I wanted my post to communicate not that I was "cool" but that life can be really random sometimes...you can end up having all sorts of crazy experiences that you never think you would have, just because life leads you that way and it makes the most sense in the moment so you choose that path. I wasn't making these choices because I was in control or on top of my life, I was making these choices because I was confused and struggling and had no idea what I was doing.
