TOW: New Paths

I just returned home from a very fun evening with PR student friends. It's interesting because we all discuss our prior lives, where we participated in something other than PR, and we have so many experiences that aren't even 'shareable' across our different paths. And as all of us start to grow up, my other non-school related friends are transistioning into what will be, for some of them, their careers.

These new paths are still fresh to us. Being a young adult *or in my case, just an adult, sigh* menas that we have to make hard choices, and live with them. We have to experience pain, and move on. We're not allowed, like in earlier days, to let that pain swallow us whole anymore...we have bills to pay, commitments to keep, and no one is going to wash our laundry for us unless we're paying them.

But there are beautiful things we get to experience. Being an adult, a real adult, is fresh to us. We're not bored of office gossip and break-ups, pregnancies or holiday visits. We're still traveling the world, and racking up debt and making bad financial, romantic and personal decisions. And we kinda like it. It doesn't make us tired yet. It's still exciting.

Probably the most interesting thing I am learning, as a 'mature' student, is that starting a new path as an adult means that we don't change our personalities, we don't wear masks in the same way that we did when we were kids--those were emotional masks, masks to hold in all of our overflowing feelings that keep changing who we are, every minute. Now the masks we wear are for protection, to help us stand in the midst of all our personal crises, because it's not our emotions that are overflowing, but often our lonliness, lost in the world by ourselves on our new, often separate paths. Before, it was too much to just be us, to keep changing. Now we don't want to change anymore, but stop the world from always trying to change us into something we don't want to be, on a path we don't want to take.

What we all need to remember, is that we're never really alone, even when we feel that we are, because all of us know the feeling of walking for miles, we just don't always share it. And while some of us show more fatigue on the road than others, it's possible to share, and still cross that divide. And sometimes, even a little bit of an echo of what security, happiness and safety is like, is enough to carry onwards. Some of us need less, and some of us need more, but all of us need reasons to keep walking into the horizon that will become our future selves.