Step 1: Buckle Down In High school
Don't actually have fun and experiment in high school. Buckle down, get good grades. Like your parents say: If you don't get good grades then you don't go to college. Heaven forbid you just get to be young and have fun! You have to keep the weight of the whole rest of your life on your shoulders!
Step 2: Go to College
Now that you wasted your high school years making sure you get into college, continue buckling down and get good grades. In fact, graduate with honors...you might as well since you aren't out there partying and being crazy like the other college kids. And you know what they say: if you don't do well in college, you won't get a good job after you graduate. So make sure you pick the most expensive school out there, because it is only worth it if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on something that becomes completely irrelevant when you try to find a job.
Step 3: Move Back to Po Dunk Town
After all of the hard work you put into graduating magna cum laude in college, make sure to completely waste your time and degree by moving back home to the boon-iest little town ever. These type of towns are great since they don't afford you any opportunities to move ahead in life, let alone in your career.
Step 4: Get a Job In Retail
Eventually, you will realize you are stuck in a place with nowhere to go in your career and you will become desperate enough to get a job in retail. At first, it doesn't seem so bad. You are tricked into thinking you make decent money because you are so young and naive. You will work your butt off for big corporate douche bag company and attempt to get promoted. Silly, naive child! It it not about the work you do, it is about who is the manager's favorite and evil politics! After wasting 3 years of your young life working hard in a job you hate and continuously coming up empty handed, you will walk away before you break down.
Step 5: Move Halfway Across the Country
After being denied and denied, and feeling like a down-trodden fool, you will decide to move 1,200 miles away to a real city. You think that all you need is a place of opportunities and everything will fall into place. Leaving behind middle-of-nowhere town for big, shiny city will be as easy as pie. You get a taste of the good life and are ready to join the ranks.
Step 6: Wrack Up Credit Debt With A Wedding
Of course, the best thing to do right after moving to a new city and attempting to find a job is to plan a wedding. Make sure it is a really nice wedding that costs lots of money! If you don't get close to maxing out your credit cards you aren't a real bride. Now, on top of the stress of getting married, trying to change your name on everything, and finding a real job, you get to worry about your ruined credit and how you are going to pay everything off!
Step 7: Work In Retail
Driven by financial desperation, you will apply for another retail job because that is all the experience you actually do have. You will get hired by another corporate douche company that will pay you minimum wage and take the worst kind of advantage of you. They will cut your hours, and make you work ridiculously late, and you will hate yourself for being stuck there. So you will re-double your efforts to find a real job.
Step 8: Attempt to Get a Job You Actually Love
Too bad that really expensive piece of paper that you spent 4 hard years acquiring means nothing to employers. So you have a college degree, so does everyone else! You will spend many months being rejected or not hearing from job after job because you do not have any actual experience in your field. They will tell you to get an internship. That would be awesome...if you weren't an adult with bills to pay. Most internships are only open to students anyway. So you will get the joy of being caught in a delightful Catch-22, where you need experience, but no one will hire you to get experience, all while you curse college for doing absolutely squat for all the money you paid them. College is really just a big sham. As many universities see it, there is a sucker born every day, and they are going to cash in.
Step 9: Get Rejected From Graduate School
The only way you are going to be able to take internships and pay your bills is to go back to school and take out loans to cover your expenses. That's okay. You planned on going back all along, and it will get you the experience you need and a higher degree. So you will spend months writing poetry that you put your heart and soul into. You will track down your professors and beg for great letters of recommendation, and you will even write an epic essay over the stupidest topic ever. You will pay $65 you do not have in order to apply, and then you will hold your breath....and hold you breath...yup still holding your breath. In fact, the school will make you hold your breath for over 2 months before they give you an answer, even though they knew a little over a month into it what their decision would be. You will turn into a crazy person lingering at the mail box. Checking and double checking for the piece of mail that will decide your whole future. Then, with one small piece of paper, your future will be left in tatters. You won't get into graduate school. You will read that letter and feel disgusted with yourself, with the school. They tell you to re-apply in a year and to keep on writing. Yeah.....I will get right on that after I pick out a good cardboard box to live in since I have no idea how I am going to get a good job so I don't get evicted.
If you follow all of these steps, you too can be lost in an endless limbo of regret! People will tell you it will be okay and just to work through it and get over it. But, they will fail to tell you how to get over it. I grew up believing I was meant to do one thing in my life: write. Now, life is telling me I might have been wrong about that, that everything I thought I knew about myself is a lie. How do you just get over something like that? How do you accept that you may be ordinary? You don't. You break apart inside. You wonder how so many years of your life seem to have drifted away while you dreamed. Everything seems spoiled, rotted out. It is an infection that slowly eats you away. But if you cut the infection out, will there be anything left of the person you know. I hope to discover some kind of answer. For now, I choose to rust and decay.
