Tag: life

A Definitely Cynical and All-Around Slightly Depressing Post About Adulthood
Emily Bernstein
January 8, 2019

What do you hope to be doing in 5 years?

I hate this question. I got asked it two years ago, and the year before that. I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer it considering that I don’t know what I want to be doing when I’m 26 or 27, let alone what I’m having for dinner tomorrow night.

If you had asked me 5 years ago what I thought I was going to be doing today, I wouldn’t have said living in Israel, studying for the LSAT before going to law school. I would have said I would be interning at a publishing house in New York City, working my way up to becoming an editor while working on my own manuscript. And so much has changed since. Life is funny that way.

And I still can’t answer that question. To be honest, I can’t tell you a lot of things.

When I graduated college, I think I assumed something magical was going to happen. That the tassel was going to move, and I was just going to know. Know without a doubt what I want to do professionally, know how to pay bills, know how to budget effectively, know what I’m already doing, know how to host a classy dinner party with friends, know who I’m going to be.

Yet, here we are, six months post-graduation and, once a day, I still think how am I allowed to be an adult?

I reach for my phone to call my mom every time I don’t feel well, I text my sister constantly about my friends and in dire need of advice, and my dad is my go-to guy on all my technology questions.

And let’s not forget about the internet.  If I have no idea how to do something, the whole world – or almost all of it – is at the tip of my fingers.

But still…

I have no idea what I’m doing.

Google is no help. Google gives me WikiHow articles. Google gives me advice columns about making my bed every morning, checking my ego, calling people back in a timely manner, being grateful. But that’s not how to be an adult, that’s just how to be a good human being.

I guess what I want to know is: when do I start knowing?

And I’d like to know. Just know. I’d go to school forever if I could – study literature, law, politics, teaching, history, art. I’d learn and study and then maybe I’d have the knowledge. But I doubt it.

See, school is really useful in that it gave me – and will continue to give me – critical thinking skills that are useful in the real world to an extent. But what’s going to give me the knowledge (maybe I should be referring to it with a capital K) is getting out into the world and working and acting like an adult.

But how am I supposed to know how to be an adult? High school and first year of university classes take so much care to introduce you to and ease you into what it is to be a college student. Then, you get to senior year, you have your graduation gown and you’ve decorated your cap, and what do you get?

An empty diploma booklet and a bag full of “goodies” containing an envelope asking for donations.

No helpful hints on how to actually be an adult – just a drawn-out graduation speech from some household name celebrity that has vague references on how to succeed as an adult. Not that I didn’t like my graduation speaker – he was actually quite funny – but his advice didn’t have a lot of weight. His speech was engaging and full of humorous anecdotes that, surrounded by the magic of graduation, really inspired me.

But here I am. And… I feel like I’m floundering.

As millennials, my peers and I face a lot of criticism about being lazy or spending too much money on avocado toast or feeling better than our jobs.

But it’s the opposite. We have to work twice as hard as other people to prove ourselves, to make our voices heard, to make our positions matter. Our toiling away in jobs we feel better than is because the job market demands experience in fields we don’t have experience in due to our toiling away in school for 17+ years. I’ve had a job since I was 15 and I still don’t have enough office experience to even interview to be someone’s assistant.

So how am I supposed to use my fancy degree from a fancy university to do anything other than something I feel might be slightly below me due to the lack of experience I have. (This statement does not apply to what I’m doing right now in Israel – it is obviously a feeling expressed in cynicism about the job market in America.) So yeah, we feel better than our jobs.

How could we not? We’ve been in school for 17+ years working our butts off for jobs we can’t get.

And, personally, all I see are other people my age floundering and putting on their work clothes every morning pretending they know what they’re doing – just like I do. None of us really know anything, so we eat our avocado toast with pride because at least we know that avocado is amazing.

I’m not trying to make excuses for my generation. Really, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand. And I’m sorry if you came to this blog post looking for some sort of conclusion. I don’t have one.

Yet.

So, I guess, for now, I’ll stick with the age-old adage of fake it ‘til you make it. After all, that’s what everyone else is doing…right?

שׁלום

“How Much Is Easy Going To Get You?”
Emily Bernstein
November 17, 2018

“But easy’s like, who cares? Easy’s like, how much is easy going to get you?”
-Anne Lamott

I’m a self-declared homebody. I’m also an unashamed introvert. I need time to myself to recharge and feel fully human again – to brush off the morning I woke up feeling depressed and had to drink three cups of water in quick succession to get my body going, to stop dwelling on that one thing I said on Tuesday about something so unimportant that I’m the only one still thinking about it, to start again. And I love having my own space. After a long day at work, I like coming home to a space I inherently know is my own – a place that feels like, and is, a home. And yeah, I like curling up in my free time with a book or with Netflix. All of this soothes my very heavy and needy anxiety. It calms me.

Now, pack all of this into two suitcases and a backpack and move it all across the world to a foreign country for 10 months. I know, sounds impossible, right?

It’s safe to say that (after almost three months) I’m finally starting to feel settled. My apartment is becoming home. My roommates have adjusted to the fact that, sometimes, I’m too overwhelmed to communicate beyond hellos. I’ve started to feel comfortable in a city that, for a long time – even before I decided to move here – was little more than a line in a prayer, a place to visit next Pesach.

And now that Jerusalem is home (a phrase I never thought I’d have the privilege to write), now that I’m starting to feel comfortable, I’ve realized this:

It’s not supposed to be easy.

This probably sounds silly. Duh, Emily, why did you ever think moving across the world to a place where there will be a language barrier, a cultural barrier, and the like would ever be easy?

But that’s not what I mean. Because no one in their right minds would think any of that would be easy. I don’t mean easy in terms of simplicity of logistics. I mean easy in terms of emotionally, intellectually, and ideologically.

What I mean is that an opportunity like this – to live in Jerusalem, have a fellowship, work within the government is supposed to be challenging. It’s supposed to have felt odd and difficult at first.

Because if we don’t push ourselves out of these comfort zones, if we don’t search for anything beyond our satisfying little boxes, if we don’t move beyond our lane, we will never grow. 

A program like this forces you to look at the world, and all its inhabitants, more intensely, and in a new light. We are all looking at our own views and opinions more closely – whether that is spurred on by each other, our internship placements, or our speakers – and whether or not our views change is irrelevant because at least we’re listening.

I find myself looking more critically at the world. My friends and I have conversations that shift from Israeli politics, to US politics, to what’s new in American football, to religion, and back again – something that simultaneously makes my head spin and impresses me. I wake up every day with a new conviction to change something.

So, okay. I’m ready for more challenges. I’m ready to push myself. I’m ready to step even further outside of my box.

Bring it on.

.שׁלום