Hi! I love all of your blogs and books and essays. I love your artsy Instagram photographs featuring your cute children and fun lawn parties. I'm addicted to your lines and paragraphs, the way you talk about the peppery taste of cilantro and your husband's melting smile. I don't know what I would do without them. Here's mine.
I'm twenty-three. I can't keep anything alive, not my relationships, not the rosemary on my windowsill. Sometimes I go multiple days in a row without wearing pants. All I really want to do is eat ALL THE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES.
I can't hang onto friends to save my life. I live in a completely different place, on average, every three-fifths of a year. (This is entirely factual. I did the math.) I'm happy that you have had the same friends since you were four, but I have grown so far away from every single person I knew when I was young that it is hysterical to watch us try to come up with something to talk about.
I'm also glad that you are always bonding deeply with new friends that you intend to have forever, sit on each other's porches well into old age, be a pallbearer at their funeral, etc. It is my fate to meet people I love and then leave four days later (see above). I don't know why I have to keep doing this, except that I've never been anywhere I liked enough not to leave.
I can't hang onto friends to save my life. I live in a completely different place, on average, every three-fifths of a year. (This is entirely factual. I did the math.) I'm happy that you have had the same friends since you were four, but I have grown so far away from every single person I knew when I was young that it is hysterical to watch us try to come up with something to talk about.
I'm also glad that you are always bonding deeply with new friends that you intend to have forever, sit on each other's porches well into old age, be a pallbearer at their funeral, etc. It is my fate to meet people I love and then leave four days later (see above). I don't know why I have to keep doing this, except that I've never been anywhere I liked enough not to leave.
You are all writers or photographers or consultants (what is that?), but I haven't found work that I love. There's this vision I have, this thing I want to do, but it's so far away I can't seek it yet. I'm struggling to find good work, holy work, something worth spending part of a life doing. I have a different job every three-fifths of a year. Right now I'm not even sure what my job is, exactly. Whenever someone starts walking towards my desk, I just start scribbling maniacally on a legal pad.
I'm really happy you have men in your lives you can't imagine living without. But all the men my age are twenty-three. I'll just let that sink in.
Why am I in Nederland, Colorado, you ask? because I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE FUN. That's it. That's exactly how much thought I put into that one. I'm here because I love the way sun-baked pine needles smell and I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood entirely comprised of log cabins, but let's face it, mountain people are completely insane and I'm lonely as hell. I haven't met a man with all his teeth intact in weeks. All the women my age left long ago and didn't give me the memo, probably because I wasn't wearing any pants and was fishing cookie crumbs out of my cleavage.
I guess I can't really be mad at you. I just read about how your life is so purposeful, so chock-full of meaning, and I don't know what I'm doing or who I am, and I want to be thirty and know what's up. There are days that I love having adventures, days that I'm relieved my biggest responsibility is keeping my Australian Shepherd alive, but this isn't one of them. I'm tired of seeking. Today I just want to find, to be found.
I guess I can't really be mad at you. I just read about how your life is so purposeful, so chock-full of meaning, and I don't know what I'm doing or who I am, and I want to be thirty and know what's up. There are days that I love having adventures, days that I'm relieved my biggest responsibility is keeping my Australian Shepherd alive, but this isn't one of them. I'm tired of seeking. Today I just want to find, to be found.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you that it would be great if you could write about how being thirty isn't all it's cracked up to be, and you miss your flawless skin. Thanks!
Sincerely,
Kate
