The first and most sincere reason is that I am generally bad at thank you notes. There are a lot of ancillary excuses, like how I had bronchitis for the three weeks following graduation. Or that I subsequently drove 5,368 miles. Or that I then had to start a new job and move to a new city.
But I swear I had good intentions. I even bought a large number of postcards in Glacier National Park that I intended to send to all the kind people who nicely sent a card and gave me a bit of money when I graduated college. I appreciated that money a lot because it meant I was able to spend two weeks traveling after graduation and also not starve when I arrived in New York.
My grandmother has always had an innate reflex for thank you cards but I've never had her graces nor the organizational skills within my social life to send out cards as regularly. I understood graduation was a big deal, but I had just moved to New York and life was stressful and weird and the only furniture I owned was an air mattress, a wooden table I built in my high school shop class and a large cooler that I used as a chair, while I watched Netflix alone after work. The fact that my life was in chaos seemed like a good enough excuse at the time.
And then I hit on the idea that I would send the cards when I finally got my life together. When I wasn't an intern, and we didn't live with two forty year old men a mile from the train. When I felt like I was a real adult who had actually acquired the stable and prosperous life that I assumed college would guarantee me. So I told myself I could wait and send the cards when I had good news to bear, when everything had worked out and I'd found some level of conventional success.
That was mid July 2014; I was convinced I'd have those cards in the mail by October. I was sure that by then I would get hired by the place I was interning. I felt confident that we'd at least be on our way to a new apartment because I would no longer be paid a salary that was barely on par with, if not lower than, the average barista's take home pay.
But things did not get easier at the speed I was hoping for. And I got demoted down the life-ladder from intern to stay at home boyfriend. I spent a winter writing cover letters at a folding table in a poorly insulated basement that was masquerading as my kitchen. I had a bad job and then no job. Needless to say, those cards remained on top of my dresser.
I came across those cards in my desk the other day when looking for stamps to send in our renewal lease at our current apartment, a place that features both an actual living room and no 40 year old roommates. It took over a year and a half to get here but finally I feel comfortable enough with where I am, to want to tell people that I actually have my life (sort of) together. As I sat in my apartment with Grace, I finally felt comfortable in this time and place in my life. I think the first year out of college was the hardest one I've faced yet in my life because for the first time there was no real prescribed next step I was supposed to take.
Sure, there were the stock options of consulting, law school, work at a startup, apply for a one year master degree in figuring out your life priorities, but none of those seemed like the right choice. And the choices I made in that first year weren't even the right ones either.
And in a new city, where every one of my friends no longer lived within five blocks of the same bar (RIP the Cove) the world got a lot lonelier. I got to look myself in the eyes a lot about what I really wanted to be doing with my time every day. Before in my life, every success had led to a clear next step: do well in school, get into good classes, do well in those classes, get into good college, do well in good college, graduate. And then, do whatever it is that people do.
Before I finished college I didn't really know what I was doing with my life; I spent a lot of the spring of 2014 telling people I intended on being homeless and/or a cat mentor. I spent a lot of 2015 avoiding telling people what I was doing at all.
But as I watched spring bloom in New York this year, I felt like I would finally have something positive to say in those thank you cards. That I could pay my bills, and where I lived would neither disappoint nor scare my parents, and that I actually was cooking regularly.
I think pop culture grooms us to imagine that figuring life out will not be all that challenging. But real life is hard and no matter how good a foot you get off on, those first few steps are wobbly. While those thank you cards are still sitting in my desk for now, I'm a bit more optimistic about Christmas cards this year.
