black women center: You know what I think.

Monday, October 4, 2010

You know what I think.

I’ve been told that turning 20 can be a game-changer, because once you are no longer a teenager, the realization hits that you need to get your shit together. I will be the first to declare to you that despite having declared a major in linguistics, there isn’t much else I can declare to you with any sureness other than that I do not have my shit together. My shit is apart.

Reason tells me that this is why I am a fake adult. I should have my shit together because I am not white or upper middle-class or middle middle-class or male, so I better get my shit together before the world tears me apart.

But what I think is that it is adult enough for me at 19 to go back to the shitty, moldy apartment that I now call home, and that UC Berkeley and my mother pay the rent for, and sit down with some headphones and the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack and worriedly, worriedly Google “symptoms of depression” after hesitating to do so for the better part of a year, not having felt like I needed to since I was eight.

And I breathed a sigh of relief and probably frustration because I am melodramatic and I think I would have liked an excuse for why living has been so mentally and emotionally taxing lately, and because I think the answer to every question I have is that I am just in a big, big rut (a big rut-rut), and if every thought of "It would be easier if I died" is appended by "But my mom and brother," I think I'm okay.

Which sucks because that means this is, like, a personalized rut that only I can get myself out of.

And then I opened a new tab to watch YouTube videos.

Anyway, I’m 20 now. This is what I was wearing back in the day, when I was 19. This is the look of someone who doesn't have her shit together and knows it: