Recently someone asked me the best advice I can give to young girls today. I thought about how I wanted to respond, thinking of all the cliché answers you’ll find in high school yearbooks and quotes on Instagram about girl power and being your own boss. Those overplayed words never resonated with me, and rather than offer positive reinforcement to point them in the right direction of their lives, I wanted to offer advice they probably won’t hear anywhere else.
This was the advice I gave:
“Get into trouble. Stay out all night. Kiss boys at bars. Get your heart broken. Order pizza at midnight. Skip class. Lose friends. Don’t apologize. Be chaotic.”
Now is the time for mothers of young girls to look away. Soliciting advice to skip a class or cause conflict with your peers is pretty much everything we are taught not to do. We are told to go to school. Behave. Go to more school. Get a job. Make money. Save. Get married. Start a family and so on and so forth. It’s almost inept in us to focus on that timeline. But what would that give us? A few degrees, maybe? Perhaps a loaded savings account and a home filled with perfectly placed things. Stability, I’m sure of. Memories, I’m not.
The question provoked a lot of emotions in me, ones I didn’t know I had. It made me think about my life now as a new mom and wife, how many years I’ve been in my career already, and how my days of staying out all night and kissing boys at bars seems so long ago, yet somehow just like yesterday. I thought back to the days where I was young in age, dumb in life experience, and broke with the idea that I was never going to have to grow up. Back then, life was as serious as a 10AM macroeconomics class and as silly as a night spent sleeping in a bagel store.
I have never, despite my parents’ weak attempts to keep me on that timeline, stuck to the cookie cutter plan mentioned before. It took me 5+ years to finish college, attending 3 schools, and changing majors twice. Having a family nestled in a huge house in the country or multiple credit cards with unlimited balances wasn’t even remotely on my radar. I, in some way, thrived in chaos and that chaos, whether I created it or not, made me who I am today.
The chaos that I’m referring to doesn’t relate to anything violent or criminal. The chaos was pure harmless fun. The chaos resided in a girl who was young, filled with adventure, and unwilling to sacrifice a second of her life towards anything not worth her time.
Let’s jump back to 2015.
Summer was coming to an end and we wanted to have one last hooray before classes started back up. I had just arrived back to the city from a summer spent in San Francisco. I was newly single, 21, feeling like I had a new lease on life. I was ready to jump right into New York in my twenties, Carrie Bradshaw style.
We pregamed at home, then we pregamed some more. We pregramed just about everywhere south of 14th street, making our way through the city feeling absolutely untouchable. We flirted our way to free drinks, on rooftop bars, speakeasies with $20 vodka sodas, and everything in between. Our limit did not exist. The only thing that mattered was the weather was warm, we were young, and it was New York City.
I remember opening the door of my Uber outside my apartment at exactly 5AM. We made our way up the steps as my roommate and I looked at each other to take out our keys. We quickly realized neither of us had remembered them.
We sat on our stoop (yes, just like you see in the movies) brainstorming every possible way to get into our building. We came up with a plan that if someone were to just come in or out of the front door, we knew were could get inside our apartment. We sat and waited for a while, but with a brownstone made up of only 3 units, our chances of getting in at the hour were super low. We were stranded. Everyone we knew was asleep. The only other person who had a key was subway stops away and not answering their phone. We sat there a little while longer, attempting to sleep in our vestibule until someone came in or out. Hopeless, pathetic, and so naïve.
Where could we go to kill some time? It was just approaching 6AM and we knew we would have to wait a little longer to get back in. Luckily for us, our go to neighborhood bagel spot was 24/7.
There I was in a short little white romper, Chanel bag and wedges, sitting at The Bagel Smith counter at 6AM. Fighting sleep, with moments of it, casually eating a blueberry bagel, making small talk with the poor worker who had to shlep through the night shift, trying to fight off feelings of, “how did I get here?” It was a night of adventure fallen to pieces.
Once I returned home and slept for a solid 5 hours, I woke up feeling fresh as a daisy. I realized those thoughts were brought on by temporary embarrassment and extreme exhaustion. It was already a thing of the past. Something to laugh at, a lesson on life. “Make sure we have our keys” was not a lost statement in our household and generally in my life.
You might be thinking, “how could a person who once slept in a bagel store become a mother just 5 or 4 years later.” My answer to you is this: I am a mother now because of moments like that. I had crazy, unhinged, careless experiences that taught me how important it is to have responsibility and structure. I turned the mistakes and chaos into lessons, ones not from my parents, teachers, or other adults, rather ones learned by living in the moment and for the minute.
The truth is, you might not find yourself sleeping in a bagel shop but you’re definitely going to make mistakes. Those mistakes are the only thing you need to help you grow in life. You don’t need a fancy job or a perfect GPA to prove you have your shit together. You just need experience. The real world doesn’t care how many A’s you got in school, after a while those accomplishments become trivial. The real-world cares how you handle yourself when push comes to shove, how you respond to chaos and to imperfection.
So, I say, if you ever find yourself sleeping in a 24/7 bagel store in Brooklyn, you just might get everything you’ve ever wanted in life. Avoiding the chaos is so much harder than embracing it and letting it turn you into the person you are meant to be.
babeswhoball.com 