Thursday, January 6, 2011

what's mine

See the left half of that little pink house? That's mine. Well sort of. I pay rent to live in it. Being an adult seems to be a lot about owning things...or sort of owning them. It's those "sort of" situations that make me feel like I'll never really feel grown-up. I have a car "sort of." I mean it's mine, but it was my parents first and they gave it to me (it's a 99 ford escort, i'm spoiled, but not THAT much). I have a masters degree "sort of." I mean it's mine, but I'm still paying off the loans and I'm pretty sure if you don't pay they take those things back. Right? Right?! Why else would anybody pay them?!

My job is mine. That's one thing I feel pretty proud about. For years, pretty much from 2004 on, I've felt like I've been perpetually searching for something salaried, with benefits, that I liked doing. And I have it now. It's fantastic. As stressful as it can be sometimes (thank you 11-hour work day yesterday), I am so grateful for it. So it's hard not to define myself by it. If I took it away, tried to wipe it from my head for a minute, and think how I would identify myself it begins to get tricky. This is being an adult. People always seem to take what they do as an adjective about who they are. When you're 13 it's all about what you like. At 13, if some other 13 year old asked me to describe myself (probably in a chatroom), I would have said, "I like R.E.M., thrift store clothes, thinking I'm funny, talking on the phone, and trying to keep things from my parents. Oh and pretending I'm older than 13 whenever possible."

So now these type of things have been replaced by "hobbies." Because for adults owning things also now means owning things about themselves and what they're passionate about. And you have to decide those things in a way that sometimes feels similar to deciding to like R.E.M.

I always feel like I'm scrambling for hobbies. Because of this I've learned how to knit, to cook, to rock climb, and to exercise. There are a lot of young adults I know that do social sports like kick ball or take yoga. I wonder if any of this really works for them, because I feel like it only "sort of" works for me. I do the things, I like them, but I don't feel like I can own them. I never became a knitter or a rock climber; I learned how to do those things and thought, "okay, what next?"

From age 4-17 I took dance classes and loved them. Once a week I would put on tap shoes and/or ballet shoes and think, "I like dance. It is a thing I like to do. It is part of me." I've thought about taking dance classes again, sad adult dance classes with other people trying to find a hobby, but I feel like I'd only be trying to recapture that certainty that I had when I was younger.

I'm pretty sure everybody *needs* to have something that they can latch on to when they try to adjectivize (deal with it) themselves. It makes me think of those acrostic poems everybody wrote with their names when they were kids. What would mine be now?

R- sort of rock climber
A- sort of artistic
C- sort of cook
H- sort of hot (couldn't resist that)
E- sort of educated
L- sort of literate

I guess maybe it's about just hopping that sort-of hurdle and totally owning things whether you really 100% do or not. I'm 60% sure of that.