Next

I quit my job. Two more days and I won't be employed. "What are you doing next?!" people excitedly ask me.

I don't know yet. I don't really know.

I landed my current job after landing an entry level job at the same company. It was early 2010 and I was finally finishing undergrad, after taking some time off to get back on track after that pesky divorce business. I had majored in Social Justice Studies with a minor in Feminist Theory. Right. Super marketable. But how I loved it, each and every moment of it! School had become my escape from a bad marriage, a place to hide, and luckily, that hiding place made me a better person. Not knowing what was next, I just wanted to find a job I didn't hate, and one that paid the bills. And there I was, an entry level customer service agent. And here I am, two and a half years later, an account executive, managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in my portfolio of clients. Sometime earlier this year I stopped and thought, Huh. How did that happen?

I remember that I had just started dating P. not too long before landing the gig. I told him excitedly about it as he made me breakfast one morning. He was waiting at my apartment after my second interview and we jumped up and down together when I told him I had been offered the job. He was there when I called my mom to tell her that I had just doubled my annual income. And through it all, both P and my mama kept reminding me that there was something else out there that I wanted.

My mother was a musician. She made her living doing this. When it came time for college, she didn't direct me practically, but told me to do what I loved. At eighteen, I loved a lot of things. I chose one. For a long time I thought my choice unwise. But now that I see it come full circle, that I'll be using those skills and interests and talents again in graduate school and beyond, I feel whole. Is that weird? I think of the broken self I was, trying to finish school, but how whole I felt, somewhere inside of me. Somewhere, I was storing all I was learning, there for a later time.

I think this is that time.

In the four months between two days from now and starting school in January, I am breathing. The past five years have been the most beautiful and most painful. I am cashing in all the summer breaks I never had, all the indulgences of arrested development I never took, and taking four months to be me. To figure out who I am, emerging from the first half of my twenties. To make sure I'm braced for the next crazy thing. (They're always around the bend.)

My sister-in-law is moving to Chicago this week. Today, we texted back and forth about her move. Of course, I couldn't help but remember my move to Chicago at her age. Walking home from the el tonight, a perfect city breeze guiding me home, I recalled my last night in my childhood bedroom. All of the furniture was packed in the moving van, ready to drive north early the next morning. I made myself a pallet on my bedroom floor and grabbed Ernie, the plush Sesame Street character I'd had since toddler-hood, and stretched out in that room one more time. The walls were bare and my bed was gone, and my books were packed. My mom knocked lightly on the door and pushed it in.

"You can sleep in my bed if you want, honey." I said I was fine, wanting one final night in my room. Looking back, I see now that she wanted one final night with me next to her, something she knew she'd never have again after that night, that she hadn't had in years. But she was usually good with boundaries. She knew what I wanted too, and shut the door.

I hope my sister-in-law does what she wants. I hope I continue to. I hope my mother would look at me again right now, take in the gravity of my decision, shut off my light, and close my bedroom door.