Choose Your Own Adventure

A couple weeks ago, I realized that I have officially been a college graduate for a year. It was a weird thing to think about. A year ago, I was depressed because the party of senior year was over. I had no plan. I was starting this blog. I was homeless. I hadn't yet resigned myself to moving to Oregon, but I knew that if I did, that I would feel like a failure. I felt like it would just be killing time until I went to Alaska - that it would be a static point in my life. And I was right. I've spent more than half of this year thinking it was the worst decision I'd ever made, mostly because I hadn't made the choice for myself.

My friend Ashley came to visit me this weekend. We've been friends since our freshman orientation nearly 5 years ago. We spent the weekend wandering the back roads, wine tasting, hiking waterfalls, and seeing the Redwoods, and every day was just a reminder of the way we decided to live life last year. Last January, we went on a week long road trip of the South. We didn't have a plan. We just hit the road, going wherever the wind took us - sometimes literally. We started talking about the trip (and then eventually, life in general) like it was one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read when you were a kid - where every page is like a fork in the road. You just have to take it one choice at a time.

While Ashley was here visiting, I started seeing the juxtapositions of my old world and the new world I've created for myself here - the differences between who I was a year ago and who I am now. She met my new friends, and we went on another adventure in a new place after more than a year. Ashley and I are already in two completely different places in our lives, but we easily slipped into the same mode of thinking from our January road trip. It was just so much easier to take each day one choice at a time when I had her back in the front seat with me.

It was also in the juxtapositions of this old friend in my new world that I realized that this year hasn't been a purposeless at all. I've changed, not reverted backwards like I suspected. This year hasn't been static. Working at Macy's hasn't been a waste of time. I've made great friends I wouldn't have now if I'd stayed in Texas or gone somewhere else. Overall, perhaps this "worst decision I've ever made" wasn't really that bad after all. Perhaps it was just one of those pages in the adventure book where you only get one choice, and it's what you make of it that determines whether you survive or not.