Nobody prepared me for this.
That you’ll be in the age where you trust your body clock more than the actual alarm. You can skip lunch, but never your coffee breaks. You find yourself puffing cigarettes in every inconvenient situation there has been. You’ll return to listening to old music because it pulls back certain memories of when life was softer for you. Finding your closest old friend with whom you used to be inseparable is getting married, and you try to understand why you’re uninvited. That you’ll find yourself just nodding and doing your best to suppress your sighs when someone asks you when it's your turn to walk down the aisle, or if you’re not scared that it'll be difficult for you to have a baby when you reach thirty.
You will find yourself constantly avoiding the sun or crossing the street to escape family friends. That you’re there in the kitchen every midnight, cooking instant noodles while trying to get your paperwork done. That you'll rush to rinse your face with water just so they won't notice you were freshly crying. That you stop showing up at family gatherings or school reunions. That you don’t have the energy you used to, and you’ll always choose to just lay in bed and wonder what happened to the hobbies you once had when you were in high school. You find yourself so caught up in the present responsibilities that knitting new dreams ends up consuming so much of you, it makes you internally exhausted just by thinking about it. That it's too late to give up and risk what you already have, but too early to let go of your fears and doubts about whether you'll live like this forever.
Nobody prepared me to think that being an adult means constantly living in a pattern. Just here, hopping on the predictable sequences and juggling the pieces of our lives
and knowing you don’t have the right to complain because, at least, you’re good at balancing on life's tightrope and making both ends meet
—that at least, as they said, we’re getting by.
Nobody prepared me for this.
That you’ll be in the age where you trust your body clock more than the actual alarm. You can skip lunch, but never your coffee breaks. You find yourself puffing cigarettes in every inconvenient situation there has been. You’ll return to listening to old music because it pulls back certain memories of when life was softer for you. Finding your closest old friend with whom you used to be inseparable is getting married, and you try to understand why you’re uninvited. That you’ll find yourself just nodding and doing your best to suppress your sighs when someone asks you when it's your turn to walk down the aisle, or if you’re not scared that it'll be difficult for you to have a baby when you reach thirty.
You will find yourself constantly avoiding the sun or crossing the street to escape family friends. That you’re there in the kitchen every midnight, cooking instant noodles while trying to get your paperwork done. That you'll rush to rinse your face with water just so they won't notice you were freshly crying. That you stop showing up at family gatherings or school reunions. That you don’t have the energy you used to, and you’ll always choose to just lay in bed and wonder what happened to the hobbies you once had when you were in high school. You find yourself so caught up in the present responsibilities that knitting new dreams ends up consuming so much of you, it makes you internally exhausted just by thinking about it. That it's too late to give up and risk what you already have, but too early to let go of your fears and doubts about whether you'll live like this forever.
Nobody prepared me to think that being an adult means constantly living in a pattern. Just here, hopping on the predictable sequences and juggling the pieces of our lives
and knowing you don’t have the right to complain because, at least, you’re good at balancing on life's tightrope and making both ends meet
—that at least, as they said, we’re getting by.