l'etranger

‘What do you do?’

It’s the most dreaded question anyone can ask me, and unfortunately, at 23 years old, I am getting it an awful lot. When I answer with the inevitable ‘oh well… uhh… I finished my degree last year and have taken this year off’, I get the even worse question; ‘So what will you do?’

‘I don’t fucking know, okay, Susan!’

… is what I would like to reply. Apparently this is not an appropriate response though.

Nor is the truth;

‘Mostly, I sit in bed with twenty cups of tea and binge watch Netflix.’ because Susan doesn’t think that’s awfully funny. So my usual response is, ‘I’m not sure’. And this is the worst part; Susan looks at me with pity.

I have a degree in International Relations and Criminology from Australia’s most prestigious university. I’ve work in hospitality since I was 16. I have done three international study exchanges. I’ve travelled to over 30 countries. I pay my own bills. I volunteered in Tanzania for 3 months. I graduated in the top 4% of Australia at school.

All this means jack shit to Susan.

There are a lot of “Susan’s” in my life; people who seem to think that not knowing what you want to be is in someway a sad reality and a failing on my part that I’m not set on being a doctor or lawyer. It seems to have a funny effect on other’s around you, for they will take it for granted that they have the right to preach at you and pray over you because you are undecided.

So I started to lie. Not big lies, but I tell a little white one. I might say I’m going to work in the foreign office, or I might say I’m going to be a diplomat. Or a forensic scientist, detective, journalist… the list of occupations goes on, each time I change my mind and it’s fine because Susan isn’t going to know, in fact, she doesn’t really care so long as you have a plan.

However, I was on a date the other night with a 24 year old Financial Analyst (for real though, wtf even is that?!), and he asked what I did since I had left that particular section of my curated Bumble profile empty. I said I interned in the Australian Consulate Policy Department, which isn’t true at all. I didn’t say it to impress him because the date wasn’t even going that great but I didn’t want to say I worked in a cafe and drank too much gin at 23 and nor could I be bothered trying to convince him that moving halfway across the world with no plan was a stellar life choice. So, now not only was I lying to the old fashioned Susans’ but also to young people with their apparent shit worked out.

So I started thinking, why is there so much pressure to have your life sorted by 21? Why do we have to rush through degrees to reach the end goal of a career we are going to stick out for 40 years and then retire? Why is not having a clue so frowned upon? I have a wealth of knowledge and no idea where my future is going, I don’t even know what I am having for dinner past this bottle of wine I’m drinking, so a career, kids, partner and a house are at least a few Pinot Noir hazes away.

We are a generation of millennial’s with the luxury to choose any future we so please, something that wasn’t afford in the past. We don’t have to get a career straight out of school and we can change degrees faster than you can say ‘fuck Freud’. We can also travel more extensively and live abroad more freely, and yet there is still mounted external pressure to perform to a preconceived model of success.

And truth be told, this model has caused me a great deal of stress, financial instability and anxiety since I decided that maybe Politics wasn’t for me after I finished a degree in it. So I moved to London in the vain hope that these issues would be slightly lessened by living in an outrageously expensive city with no plan whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, my problems didn’t vanish into the big city smog, but they were readjusted.

I am so poor now I don’t even have time to worry about anything else. Being poor gives one a strange sense of freedom and relief as the anxiety of being so is ended when one is genuinely poor. But I am also having the best time of my life. I am living abroad, I am meeting new people, seeing new places. I am living more independently, I am free from toxic people back home, free to do whatever I like and it’s the best feeling in the world. I’m enjoying life for everything it should be enjoyed for. I can wear ridiculous outfits; I can drink on a Monday and lie in bed all Thursday; I can quit anytime I please and all with relative ease.

This might all sound incredibly twee and irritating of me but it has also put in to perspective something else for me; why is enjoying life, being poor and having fun so tabooed we have to lie about it?

I am sick of the sympathetic looks when I say I have no fricking clue what I am going to do with my life, because for right now, what I am doing (or not doing) is making me happy and that’s all I care about.  I don’t want sympathy projected on me anymore because I haven’t achieved ‘societal enlightenment’ in the form of a house and secure job at 23. I love living my early 20’s this way. At what other point are we going to be able to uproot our lives and move overseas just because, or change our minds daily about what we want in the future? It’s so liberating realising this! Your 20’s are for doing everything you shouldn’t do later in life, not for buying houses and having long 9-5 jobs with 4 weeks annual leave. Well, it’s not for me anyway.

So fuck it, until further notice I going to be a writer/ blogger because I can and because I live in one of the most expensive (and best) cities in the world, I have a lot to write about and my bank account often limits me from leaving the house.