Am I There Yet? The Loop de loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood full text download
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The Loop de loop, Zigzagging Journey to
Adulthood
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Introduction
Chapter 1
Overcoming Uncertainty
Chapter 2
Creating Home
Chapter 3
Finding Purpose
Chapter 4
Love and Dating
Chapter 5
Heartbreak and Loss
Chapter 6
Overcoming Disappointment
Chapter 7
Discovering Yourself
Chapter 8
Finding Yourself
Acknowledgments
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In the journey to adulthood, you can use an old guidebook that
belonged to your parents, hitting up the same monuments they did
when they took the trip. It’s probably the only map you have lying
around, and it seemed to get them there, even though their lives aren’t
necessarily what you’d create for yourself. Their worn-out map
probably points to a specific route, to achievements by certain ages, to
designated stops along the way. This map shows a paved road, the
safe way.
But what if nobody gave you a map? Or what if the typical route
doesn’t do it for you? You might choose something else: to make your
own way. Your road might be one that cuts through off-limits industrial
areas, shakes up residential neighborhoods, basks in peaceful parks,
and ascends treacherous mountains. The road might feel crooked and
long while you’re on it—perhaps you even create detours for yourself
that prolong the journey, putting you far behind your friends. Am I doing
this right?, you might ask, while everybody else is drinking cocktails
while they watch the sunset. It’s interesting (or at least that’s how your
parents might describe it), but there are a lot of scary and
unphotogenic parts, too.
On my way to adulthood, I have made many loops, zigzags, stops,
and detours—my map resembles a tangled string. I often wondered if
it was leading me deep into a dark forest that
would permanently take me off the right path—
or worse, leading me nowhere at all.
Looking back, it’s clear that the loops,
zigzags, stops, and detours didn’t take me off
course; they pushed me forward. The twisted
road began to smooth out when I became an
illustrator at age twenty-eight. Doodling on
notebook margins and playing around with
lettering had always made me happy, but in my
late twenties, I got serious about happiness. I was grieving the death of
my father and the end of a serious relationship at the same time. I
realized it was up to me to put more joy into my life, which started with
my daily routine. So I put happiness on my calendar: I’d draw one
illustration every day for a year. I bought some cheap supplies, started
a new Instagram account to keep myself accountable, and began
posting drawings that revealed what I was going through: online
dating, new jobs, heartbreak, observations about dining with my
girlfriends. After a few months of spending my evenings processing
what had happened that day with a pen and watercolor paints, a lot of
strangers started seeing my daily illustrations. They’d even call my
drawings “relatable,” which made me realize that we’re all a lot less
alone than we think we are.
Suddenly, my bumpy road toward adulthood
turned into a sensical map. It began in Chicago,
where I went to college and experienced the
angst of trying to identify my perfect career
track. In my mid-twenties I moved to
Washington, D.C., where I found a job I liked, at
least, and much more than that through a series
of romantic wrong turns and dead ends caused
by grief and disappointment. Over the years, I have taken myself on
adventures around the world, to Berlin, Lisbon, Rio de Janiero, and
then Granada, picking up lessons that continued to push me in
surprising directions. I drew all these lessons, confusions, and
adventures, and found a whole tribe of people from all over the world
who were on similarly squiggly paths.
The essays in this book are notes from the scenic route to adulthood
that give some background to the illustrations inspired by love,
friendship, home, career, heartbreak, and self-discovery. They won’t
take you directly from Point A to Point B, but rather hop around my own
personal map to share with you what I’ve learned from these different
areas of growing up.
This is not a handy guidebook that will tell you how to find your
dream job or how to neatly fold a fitted sheet (the latter is impossible).
But it’s a scrapbook of my own journey—so far—to adulthood that I
hope will bring you comfort if you, too, are on a less-than-direct
journey through life. As I made my way through my twenties, other
people’s tales were guiding lights for me. Every feeling I ever had of
“me too” lit up the mysterious path before me, making it not so scary. I
wrote this book in the hope that a “me too” feeling might light up your
own trail.
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When I was twenty-four, I was working at an
oppressive law firm in Chicago. I had many jobs
around that city in my early twenties, but this one
in all its seriousness seemed more finite. After I
had worked there only a few weeks, the days felt
meaningless and unending—like I had signed my
life away to this job. My friend told me with
compassion and exasperation, “This isn’t your
whole life. This is a season in your life. In a couple
of years, we’ll say ‘Remember that weird time you
worked at a law firm?’”
She was right. It was a season. A brief, informative season that
ended up having much more significance than I could have predicted,
but I always forget to add it to my résumé.
It didn’t feel like a season at the time; it felt like the rest of my life.
That’s how most seasons feel while you’re living them, and then your
surroundings transform just as you’re getting settled in. The winter-to-
