The first image I remember is being on a train wondering where I was going and what my future held for me. I wondered how I got to this point of being a young adult whose life suddenly fell apart. I wondered why I didn't feel as free as I had expected to. When you abandon all responsibilities, any unspoken commitments or promises, and just pick up and leave, you have a blank slate. A new page just waiting to be filled. You should feel free, but somehow, I don’t. I feel less confined maybe, but I still feel exactly the same as I did in my old, structured life.
As I look out the window, all I see are factories. Some are older, some newer, and yet each is surrounded by broken down homes and buildings. Even though the sun is shining, everything we pass seems to have an overtone of gray to it. In fiction, or futuristic or apocalyptic type books, we always visit these distant dates or planets that only hold the broken remains of life, but it’s no longer fiction. Today, this is our reality, where even the “nicest” towns have sections that look as if they’re a setting of a zombie apocalypse. It’s more challenging to find a good neighborhood than a bad one and even if you are lucky enough to discover one of these havens, you’re still not completely safe from crime. No one has that luxury or peace of mind anymore, no matter where they live. We learned this the hard way in my home state of Connecticut with the Sandy Hook shooting. No one even thought of such a horrific happening being possible in quiet little Connecticut, “where nothing ever happens.” This isn’t some fictional setting, this is all of our lives today, our reality. It seems like we've grown so tolerant of these conditions that we forget that things weren't always like this. Maybe they don’t even have to be, if we started challenging ourselves. These are the topics that swim through my mind as I travel on this train to my destination.
The more I focus on my surroundings beyond the clear glass barrier, the more convinced I am that these broken down and diminishing buildings are metaphors for all of our lives as we grow. Not only do our exteriors begin to let us down, but our dreams, hopes, ideals and positive perspectives seem to crumble as well. The walls of our ideal futures that we built brick by brick beginning at a young age crumbles the more we discover reality in our adult lives.
Though I had made this weekend trip many times before, this journey to New York City felt completely different. This probably stemmed from the fact that everything was different. I was frustrated, but I also had nothing to lose. In the past year, I had become a legal adult and it ended up being more than I asked for. After twenty five unhappy years of marriage and raising two children, my parents finally got divorced. Of course, it was a long time coming, should have happened twenty years earlier and didn't take anyone by surprise, but it wasn’t as easy as I expected the event to be. I thought I was completely prepared and that they had already been emotionally separated for so long that it hardly would have affected me at all. However, they mean it when they say that divorce brings out the worst in people. Between that and my lifelong battle with a depression and anxiety disorder that reached an all-time high when I went away to college, I decided that it was in my best interest to take some time off. I figured I’d at least be able to work and save up for some money for the next stage of my life, whatever that was, but when I came back home to my old job, they ended up hiring someone new to replace me until the summer. In other words, I was out of luck until the first week of June, since absolutely no one was hiring.
Having no responsibilities was something that was taking much longer to adjust to than I would have thought. After all, it wasn't exactly something I was used to. I was an overachiever all of my life. My parents never pressured me or punished me about grades; I was always completely internally driven. I think that’s what made my current state of nothingness so shocking to anyone who knew me at any length. I had done well in school, always played instruments, participated in clubs; I was even the vice president of the drama club my senior year of high school. Everyone told me my whole life how successful I would be, no matter what I chose to do. This specifically seemed to come to fruition when I was eight years old and decided that I wanted to become a lawyer. For some reason, I saw this as the most glamorous career there was. When my love for theater and film took over, suddenly everyone seemed less supportive. And now that I have no educational goals at all for the time being, even less support.
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