What it Takes to Break You
I've been told that the post-college phase is really rough. My parents, friends, mentors, and acquaintences (I mean seriously, everybody) are in accordance. Even BuzzFeed, in one of its funny lists, proclaims the year 23 - the year after most people graduate - to be the absolute rock-bottom of a person's 20s.
My worst year may not have been 23 (I escaped the dreaded number by fleeing into the arms of a one-year Teaching Assistantship overseas), but 24 is hitting pretty hard.
There's this passage in two of the gospels about how Jesus is the cornerstone - you can either fall on him and be broken to pieces, or the cornerstone can fall on you and crush you. (Matthew 21:42-44, Luke 20:17-18) I'm not trying to say that Jesus is breaking me with his crazy counter-cultural ideas or impossible moral demands (those views of Jesus are a conversation for another time), but I do want to draw on this idea that something good can shatter you, and give you the opportunity to be re-made.
...because in the last 7 months, I have been broken.
I had stars in my eyes about being a baker. That train came to the end of the line in the shape of the night shift job I wrote about in my last post. I had put manual labor on a pedestal... and then realized it was a pedestal onto which I didn't have the strength to climb. I simply didn't have the physical resilience or the special meticulousness needed for that kind of work. I was humbled into recognizing that baking was a bad fit for me.
I thought I had emerged from college with a particular deep and lasting friendship. That friendship blew up in my face. Six months later we are picking up the pieces, but that failure shot cracks into my understanding of some things, cracks that are deeper than I can really see.
After these two things, I collected myself and my energies and decided to pursue a new career, one that people had suggested to me since I was old enough for grownups to feel entitled to tell me what I would do with my life. I decided to take up interpreting. To my utter surprise, I suspect I will actually love interpreting. So I set out to make myself a professional and took a nannying job to keep a roof over my head in the meantime.
That feels like being remade. That feels like hope for a better future. That feels like something I could actually go after with my whole heart.
But the story doesn't end there. You see, being remade is not easy, and it often hurts. Everything is new and confusing. Pieces of you fit together in new ways, and waves of change, waves of new expectations from a new world rock you and threaten to swallow you and your craft with their tallness.
Not one month into trying to make the dream a reality, my boss yelled at me.
And that was all it took to make me break down: some unkind words.
I cried more violently about that tiff than I've cried about anything all year. There I am, trying to navigate the morays of a completely new way of life, having only recently established a sense of direction of my own. I'm trying hard and all I want is to do my best, and all it takes is for one authority figure giving me a dressing down to make me feel like I'd been shoved back into the position of a middle schooler who failed some assignment.
I'm sure anyone reading this can identify with being made to feel so young.
I'm sure it's not the last time I'll get yelled at... or the last time I'll cry about it.
But I hope that I'll settle into this course I've set for myself, that the boat won't always rock quite so hard, and the waves won't always look so tall... or that if they do, I'll get used to it and develop a sense of adventure and fierce joy. I hope that I'll develop a thicker skin. But until then, if it only takes a harsh word to make me cry, I won't be ashamed of it.













