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Friday, February 20, 2015

When you're busy making other plans.


My roommate, Kaylee, is semi-recently engaged, and set to be married in October of this year. Since I work Monday through Friday during the day and she's a night shift nurse, we don't really have a lot of quality-in-person-best-friend-kinda conversations. Last night was the first night in what feels like forever that we were both home at the same time, sans boyfriends/fiances, so we finally got to squeeze in some girl talk. We started to get into "deep stuff," if you will, so I immediately suggested we continue this conversation over salsa and guac. Like any good friend, she agreed.

Like any typical twenty-somethings, we started talking about the future. From weddings, to eventual children, to money, we talked about our ideal set up; essentially, the picture we've painted of our life paths. We talked about how much our "plans" have changed as we've grown up, as plans so often do.

Back in my sorority days, I remember going to our on-campus Beef O' Brady's with a few of my sisters and one in particular starting writing down her life plan on a napkin. No lie, she said she wanted to graduate by 22, be married by 24, kids by 26, be done having kids by 30. Boom, boom, and boom. I realize now that, to an extent, she was probably joking. Because let's get real, you can't really plan your life out on a napkin, can you? How can you predict something like that? Don't you realize how your entire life can change in an instant?

So I put together what I imagined would have been me and Kaylee's "napkin plans," prior to figuring out that life doesn't really care what you planned.

Kaylee's Napkin Plan: 

  1. Graduate with a BSN.
  2. Get a nursing job.
  3. Go to grad school to become a nurse practitioner.
  4. Pay off student loans.
  5. Get married.
Sam's Napkin Plan:
  1. Graduate from college with my bachelor's.
  2. Move to California, or Chicago, or NYC.
  3. Try to "make it big" - work at a magazine, or a PR agency or, you know, become a wildly famous actress. Or something. 
  4. Date around, play the field.
  5. Get married eventually.
Clearly my plan was a little less goal-oriented than Kaylee's, a bit more far-fetched, and...well...naive. Oh, and embarrassing. From falling madly in love for what I believe will be the last time at 23, to realizing that I'm not cut out for the cut-throat L.A. type of lifestyle, it's safe to say that a lot has changed since I came up with my 17 year old pipe dream. And Kaylee met the man of her dreams, and got engaged before going to grad school and paying off all of her student loans. Surprise, surprise...a curveball!

The conclusion we both came to while rubbing our full bellies at the dining room table was that it's literally impossible to know what's next, and there will never be a "right time." It will never be the "right time" to get engaged, to break up, to move in, to move on. While it's important to have goals and ideas of how you'd like your life to pan out - it's even more important to be flexible. To realize that while it might not be the right time, it might be a good time. Does that make sense? Am I rambling? Is it Friday yet?

Do you have a napkin plan? How drastically have your plans for the future changed in the last few years? I'd love to know!

Happy weekend, guys! XO






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2 comments

  1. Love this! It's pretty funny thinking back to childhood or even a few years ago and what we had "planned." Always WAYYYY off looking at it now!

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