When you're a young woman turning 18 you're excited. You think you're in for the time of your life. I mean, why not? You're finally a legal adult, old enough to smoke, but young enough not to burn out. The world really is your oyster or whatever type of seafood is in that year. Then four fast years and 80,000 dollars later you graduate from college and you're thrown out into the so called “real world”.
Your whole identity is stripped away from you the moment that the diploma hits your hand. Your entire life you have been a student, now what? What's next?
You start to look for a job because well, that's just what one is supposed to do, right? You cry yourself to sleep after weeks of flipping through career websites and coming up with nothing except a headache and the notion that being the manager at Taco Hell might not be so bad. You finally land your “dream job” a.k.a. anything that involves a cubicle.
On the best of days, you only have to work until 6:30 and the guy in the cube next to you remembers to shower. As you count the dust mites in your cube, you silently curse off women like Gloria Steinem. If it wasn't for her, you could be sitting at home eating bon-bons right now.
It's like no matter what you do in your early 20's, there is someone judging you. If you work too much, people accuse you of wasting your youth. If you don't work at all, you look like that suburban princess who relies on daddy. And you may as well just forget about having a love life. If you party and sleep around, people insist that you should “just grow up already”. But don't you dare find a boyfriend and get engaged. You're way too young; you don't know what love is.
Sometimes you'll wake up and you won't know what to do with your life. Who would have known you'd need a Master's degree to be an administrative assistant?
As you cross the street to meet your girlfriends for a cocktail, you almost get run over by a guido in a leased 3-Series BMW. You probably should have just let him hit you; it would be the easiest way to pay off your student loans.
As you plop onto the bar stool, and down your first Cosmo, you see your girlfriends enter through the front door. One is having a horrible hair day, the other just got fired and the last is still trying to remember the name of the guy she slept with the night before. You smile to yourself, because as much as being a 20-something woman sometimes seems to suck, you know that your friends know exactly what you're going through.
So maybe you're not a hot shot CEO, maybe you have no hope in hell of moving out of your parents' basement before age 30 and maybe you don't know what you want to be when you grow up. But there is one thing you know for sure: there are girls out there just like you, your soul mates, to help you laugh your way through these crazy years we call the 20's.
