Summer Bummer

I don't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing. Usually this about 75% of my life. How to get my goals accomplished, how to stay consistent with the diet I've been on and off since I was 12, bleaching my own hair, finding a boyfriend, etc. There's an ignorance to just how important these things are, how to just get these things done is meaningless when I just act and then think later. Reflecting on how not only my choices led me where I am, but how to move forward whether the result of my impulses has led me to glory or failure. The easiest thing to do is stick to routine not think about how I have no clue how I’m going to afford college or afford a new apartment in September. The stress helps no one and frankly Its 84 degrees at 6:30pm on the last Thursday of June it won't kill me to be outside shaking ass, getting wasted, and taking a thousand pictures of an outfit I spent my entire day off contemplating wearing.

Although I am twenty years of age (practically a spinster stone me now) this is my first summer that is truly mine. I wake when I want, I eat when and what I want, I leave and come home as I please, I am physically 100% independent. My entire being is guided by the head placed on my head by two Miami ambiverts and my heart given to me by God herself to love the world and every being in it. I’ve been thinking about the reductive notion that ‘I’m just a girl’ and how it affects the way I move in the world. I pay my own bills, working at times two jobs and budgeting every luxury out of my life to afford this, I enrolled myself in school and will likely be paying for it entirely myself, until I find a well off benefactor to invest in me, and I am responsible for myself entirely. I moved across the country alone and found my apartment and job alone. I am the captain of my own ship completely.

I think back to my grandmothers lives and how what I’m doing is completely unheard of for them. Sons leave, daughters stay. Sons conquer and destroy and bring back riches from foreign lands. Daughters keep the family together and taken care of and fulfilled even to the detriment of their own needs and wants. My grandmothers were married and mothers at my age. They lived with their fathers and then their husbands. They couldn't open their own bank accounts until their children were at least school age and by then they were living in countries whose language they barely spoke or understood with nothing but the man they met less then a decade before to rely on. When I don't want to continue on, when I don't want to keep learning and growing and working I think of how I have a freedom they couldn't even have possibly imagined for themselves.

When I was 18 shortly after I graduated or before, I can't seem to recall anymore, my father’s mother turned to me and told me to wait as long as I could to marry and to have children. She told me to focus on my studies and to go as far as my dreams would take me. She said if I did fall in love to hold on to it as long as I held onto myself too. Her marriage was for the most part a conventional Mexican marriage. My grandfather worked on farms and in construction and my grandmother raised the children, took care of the house, and cleaned houses for wealthier folks. But they waited six years before having their first child. My mother’s mother was married and 20 and didn't have her first child until 26. For the time the was practically unheard of, my mother’s mother would marry at 19 and have her first child 7 months later shortly before her 20th birthday. It is this nuance that informs the way my grandparents give me advice. For one she realized that there was more to life and more to women than only what family offered and for the other her life was so informed by the fact that she was a mother right as her childhood ended.

I think both views have merits. I want a family and I want a husband and kids and community and a home to call my own and a big emerald cut diamond to show the world that I am not alone in this big wide world, but I want my own life. I want my own space, I want my own career and education and freedom. I want to make mistakes and be selfish and be able to run where the wind takes me and follow my instincts and impulses wherever they lead me without abandoning my marriage or my children. So it's now 7:15pm on a random Thursday and it's 78 degrees of pure bliss and excitement outside. I can do whatever the fuck I want. I have plans tonight, but no clue where they will lead me. I have the heart of lover, the ass people pay for, and the youth to make mistakes tonight.

Mistakes that as a woman will affect me more than if I had dick in my pants, mine would be 7inches and thick if anyones wondering, but ones I am willing to live with. Because I am not just a girl, I am woman not the first of my lineage to go out on my own, but with sense and strength enough to be one of the few to keep doing it and to not settle for less than what I desire and what I deserve. I have all the women that came before me living in me and in this lifetime they get freedom and independence and choice. And for as long as I live and for as long as my lineage goes on I will fight for and defend the rights to this. To be human is to want and to seek and to explore and to love. To be human is to know the whole world exists for all to seek this out and be fulfilled.

I have no clue what the fuck i’m doing and how i’m going to figure everything out. In the end though it will all work out as it has before and as it always will. Because I have faith, resilience, family, and sense enough to know when to give in completely to life’s unpredictability.