Life Is Not Linear
How do you embrace what life throws at you, when it doesn’t happen the way we’re taught it’s supposed to?
We are told that after college comes the real world. This is supposed to be “the time of our lives.” After graduation, your are supposed to get an amazing job in a great location and be met with promotions for your hard work. If you didn’t meet the love of your life in college, hopefully you’ll meet them during this time. Naturally you date, decide to get married and do so with the idea of starting a family. You spend 18+ years of your life beyond that working, raising your kids, and trying to maintain your marriage. After your kids go off to college, because that’s where they’re going, you retire, wait patiently to be a grandparent, and ultimately live out the rest of your life doing all the things you love with the people you love. And then you die when you’re ready.
Seem all-to-real? That’s because that’s not how it really works; life is not linear. Certainly, there are expectations, societal and familial pressures, but at the end of the day we can’t predict our futures. We can’t pre-plan our own deaths, unless we live in Switzerland but that’s an outlier. Life is all about the bumps and bruises on the way. It’s about choosing whatever is behind door number one instead of door number two. It’s about how you handle the decisions you’ve made or roll with the punches with what’s out of your control but impacting you.
Here’s another way that blissful story could look:
You don’t go to college, because that’s totally normal. You get pregnant at age 19 and don’t know who the partner is. You raise your kid alone the best way you know how. You lose your parents in an accident, so you don’t have your parents to look up to as far as what you look forward to in older age. You get a college degree at 35 after all your kids have moved out or gone off to college. You marry and get divorced, three times. In addition to maintaining a household, you end up being a caretaker for your sibling who is diagnosed with cancer at a young age. You file bankruptcy. You are diagnosed with depression and enroll yourself in an outpatient treatment program. The list can go on and on, because life is not linear.
This isn’t meant to be morbid. The reality is, any of that can happen to any of us. It’s meant to prove the point that life is not a straight line from point A to point B being all sunshine, rainbows, and roses. Life is two steps forward and one step back. Or one step forward and two steps back. It’s hardly easy. It’s emotions and how to lean into discomfort to get the help you need, when you need it.
Since most of the clients I work with are college students, it’s important I highlight what they can be experiencing in this space. Life is not straight A’s or graduating with the degree you initially enrolled into college with. Life is not about graduating with a degree at 21 years old and knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life. Life is about mental health and substance abuse and taking a break from college when you need it, and for however long you need it. College isn’t going anywhere. Life is about heartbreak, and bad decisions. Life is about failed exams and one-night stands. Life is about tears, making new friends, and knowing when to walk away in every situation. Life is about skinned knees and learning how to smile again.
Life isn’t easy. It’s not linear, in fact I’d compare it more to a line drawn by a three-year-old. They may have more realistic expectations of what’s ahead. It looks chaotic, but they’re laughing hysterically while they draw it because they know they can tackle whatever life throws at them.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
