This is hard!

I spent this past Sunday afternoon catching up with two old friends. Although we all live within a two-hour radius of each other, it seems our paths rarely cross. We're all busy doing our own thing and once in a blue moon, we pause to take a few hours and catch each other up on life and all its happenings.

One's married and having her first baby in less than a month's time. The other's still figuring out what exactly her post-college life will hold, what direction her career will take, and how a relationship might figure into all of those big questions. Then there's me. I have a stable relationship and, for the most part, a stable life, but I live at the ends of the earth and as Andy so nicely put it a couple weeks back when I was bemoaning where all my money disappears to: "Ada, you don't have a spending problem, you have an income problem."

We're all at different stages of our young lives, but we all shared a common consensus: this is hard!

A bloggy friend, Amanda, just launched her first e-book, The Grad Meets World Ultimate Guide to the First Year Out of College. The book's jam packed with all sorts of things I would have liked to have known during that first year out of college and it got me thinking. When I graduated back in the stone ages of 2007, I'd decided on taking a gap year and waiting out a tempestuous job market. (Surprise: it got worse!) But I found even when I decided I was done with the transient gap year, my transient days were anything but behind me.  Now, nearly five years out of college, I have yet to have a 40 h/w, 52 w/y, we pay for health insurance and sock away some that paycheck for your retirement sort of job. 

And I'm okay with this. I'm proud to have made as much progress as I have with my freelance writing and I'm happy to have a day job that keeps me in groceries, if not total sanity. Still, it's hard not to sometimes feel like there might be something else out there, lurking just out of reach, the golden key if you will to worry-free living.

Just this evening I was watching the Sex and the City episode where Trey turns to Charlotte and says, "I'm 43. When does it start being easy?"

As the three of us talked on Sunday afternoon, it became apparent, no matter what path you choose, it's no smooth sailing at age 25 and 26. And if Trey says it's still hard at 43, I think I'll believe him, even if he is a doofus. Heck, I beat it's still downright rough at 92. 

But then again, if it weren't difficult, things just might get a little dull.So here's to perseverance and holding our own during all life dishes out. No one ever said it was going to be easy. That's just a silly notion we all seem to pick up sometime during our undergraduate years.