Aging Backwards

It’s interesting just how much Barack Obama and Brad Pitt have in common. Well, relatively speaking. Outside of good looks, charisma and a lovely voice, the two men have kept me thinking for quite some time now about a number of the same issues, and for this, I think it’s safe for me to draw the comparison, however random it might seem.

Prior to the start of the New Year (aka just yesterday), I had just seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I semi-recommend, if nothing else than for the fact that the casting and makeup were amazing), and was in the process of reading Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. The theme of age and passion were mainstays in both of the works, and it got me to start thinking about 2008 in a very peculiar way.

In most senses, it would be logical for me to say that I think I aged a lot since the beginning of the year – back in January, I was still packing up the bits and pieces of my life here in the States for what would be 4.5 of some of the best months of my life in Europe. I ventured to London, learned about the backstreets and best pubs, jet-setted and country-hopped, and began to acclimate myself with a lifestyle I had only imagined before. This was my real “going away” to college experience, and I loved every minute of it.

It was a taste of independence that stuck with me throughout the rest of the year.

Come June, I began working full-time at a daily paper in Woodland Hills and lived with my brother and his roommate over in Westwood for three months. From the experience, I saw my own future laid out side-by-side with my brother’s, an investment banker, and his roommate’s, an assistant sports coach at UCLA. The summer gave me time to reflect on what exactly I was doing with journalism and with my career goals as a whole. Would I get sucked into the daily grind of work, home, sleep, repeat?

Not that my brother or his roommate were unhappy, but I couldn’t honestly say that they were excited about the work that they were doing either. It was a means to an end, and I think it scared me a bit to see two such capable people so devoid of passion for their work. When I initially began working in June, I too, saw just how easily I could fall into routine and the status quo, and I went through a lot of internal turmoil (melodramatic, I know I know), trying to figure out what exactly I could do to keep each day fresh, lively, inspiring.

It took a whole lot of writing and a whole lot of reorganizing for me to get back into the groove – finding a happy balance between my life and structure prior to London and the renewed sense of idealism I had picked up across the pond.

At the end of August, classes began in a flurry, and I literally keeled over in my attempt to hit the ground running. There were far too many ideas, projects, tasks floating around in my head, and the result, even at the beginning of the year, was a less-than-appealing mess of all-nighters, missed deadlines, dropped classes.
This wasn’t the formulaic collegiate life I was used to, and it was far from the kind of senior year I had hoped to have. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing the bigger picture in favor of rushing here and there to finish up tasks that I had half-started, but even so, I kept running on empty with what I can best describe now as denial.

November meant the annual dragon boat tournament up in San Francisco, and with that came a whole barrage of responsibilities that caused me to come to a temporary standstill. Post-tournament and post-break down, I decided I needed to just take a few days to reassess and process what I had been doing wrong for the entire semester, how I had let so much pressure build up to this breaking point.

It was an eye-opening, supremely honest look at my own shortcomings, and seeing those problems laid out before me made see that I had forgotten two important things:

1. I needed to take care of myself now, while I was still young – the repercussions and rewards for my actions today would manifest themselves later on down the line, and I needed to act accordingly.

2. My passion, my writing, had fallen to the wayside, and without a physical list of goals before me, I had succumbed to temporary solutions when I should have been searching for long-term goals.

Following my revelation, things in life began to fall into place once again. I heard back from Teach for America, I was elected into the editor-in-chief position for the Daily Trojan, I reorganized my role with Bamboo Offshoot, I finished off long-term stories for my journalism classes, I began to thrive on the adrenaline of getting things done because I finally had an end-goal in mind.

It was the last stretch of a long semester, but finishing out fall 2008 meant that I could start anew.

And now, just two days into January, I feel ready to start the cycle over again, sans the stress and the break-down and the horrible sleep schedules. I’ve had to replace a lot of things in my life in the last few weeks, but this also means that I get to pick and choose what I want to take with me in this last semester of college.

Packing up the bits and pieces of my life, full circle.