There is no way to sugarcoat it, life can be hard. These past three years are the prime example of doing the best you can with what you’ve got. And that is not an easy task, taking what you have and squeezing something positive out of it. Especially when you feel beaten down and tired and when it’s hard to see any trace of light at the end of a deep, dark tunnel.
But no one promised easy, no one promised that this life would be filled with rainbows and butterflies. There is a lot of hard work and effort that goes into the moments leading up to the celebrations…which are fleeting because, sooner or later, reality sets in.
Most of us who graduated in the mid-ish 1990’s remember the movie Reality Bites – a story of four friends (who had just graduated from college) move in together and try to navigate the next chapter of life.
I went with a group of friends to see this before our college graduation, and I remember leaving and thinking “this real-world thing is going to suck.”
How would we survive? Rent was due, every month. Electric bills and credit card statements were not our parents’ responsibility anymore (well, most months at least). We had to balance all of this new financial responsibility and still try to have a social life.
We had to get a J.O.B to survive… and, if you had a late night out, that J.O.B is still expecting you to be there by 8am, no skipping, no three-absence rule. You don’t show, you’re fired.
Funny that we thought we knew everything until we realized we didn’t. Dreams of landing the perfect job and living in the perfect apartment were replaced with settling for a position selling copiers to get “experience” and coming home to an apartment with mix matched furniture from your parents’ house and praying that someone had remembered to buy toilet paper.
But we did survive the bills with late fees, pasta and peanut butter, maxed out credit cards…. all a part of this journey we call life. The failing and falling, it’s all what you chose to take away from it…you can wallow in defeat or pick yourself up and move along. Wallowing is easier for sure but it doesn’t get you any further than where you have already been.
Just as the title of the movie says, reality does bite…sometimes. But with time we discover the little glimpses of joy that are sprinkled in between and that, that is what the journey is all about.