Living with Your Parents When You’re 22+

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but when you graduate from college you’re going to move back in with your parents.

It doesn’t matter how talented/employable/desperate you are: you will move back with your parents. You might not be there for long—maybe you’ll only be there for a month because the lease on your awesome new penthouse starts in July and your shitty undergrad apartment kicked you out in May. But no matter how long you actually live with your parents, it will be too long.

Moving back in with your parents often brings on a multitude of confusing and paradoxical feelings, the likes of which you probably haven’t felt since you struck puberty in the seventh grade. On one hand, you don’t have to pay rent, worry about food being in the fridge, or wonder if the electricity will suddenly shut off because goddamn Ryan didn’t pay the bill on time again. But with this sense of comfort comes an abject and abiding sense of shame. You go to bed each night beneath all the memorabilia you thought was cool in high school when you last redecorated your room and wonder where things went so horribly wrong that you ended up back in the place where you started?

Guess which one is you.

If it makes you feel any better, your parents probably aren’t very excited to have you move back in with them either. My mom got a puppy the weekend I graduated from college, a placeholder for her soon to be empty nest. Unfortunately for me, the dog is cuter, and has a better personality than me. 

 The undeniable evidence.

Unfortunately for my mom, neither myself nor my 19 year old brother have yet moved out of the house. It’s like being in high school again, except there’s a lot more booze. My parents have really been pretty great about the whole thing so far, though they have mentioned that when I finally do leave the nest, they’re going to throw me a Moving Out Party.

That’s right, a Moving Out Party, not to be confused with a Going Away Party. It’s a small, but significant departure.

So how does one cope with the moving back with the parents? Well the best thing to do really is make the most of it, because you’ll probably be eating Velveeta on crackers the moment you walk out of their door. My parents live a life of unparallel luxury compared to my standards of living. I still remember my stunned awe when I returned from Florence and realized that my parents have separate paper products for different things: toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, and tissues. In my apartment, we had one paper product for all of these things. And sometimes not even that.

So what’s the moral of this tale exactly? Namely, the real world is a scary, fucked up place. And if moving back home is the most pressing of your problems, just remember that things are probably going to get much worse before they get any better. Enjoy the luxury of having both tissues AND toilet paper while it lasts, friends.  

Grad School Ahoy!

Graduating with your English degree into a veritable wasteland of employment opportunities sucks. This, coupled with my realization that school is the only thing I’ve good at, led me 11 months ago to embark on the dubious adventure known to some as “applying to grad school.” To those who had survived the ordeal, it is better known as “that time I self medicated with tequila. Repeatedly. For months.”

While waiting to hear back from schools, I left my almost minimum wage job in a faux tuxedo covered in mayonnaise and defeat.  

But after my acceptance, I still leave work covered in WIN! (And sometimes red velvet ice cream.)

While the lows of the post-graduate are low, the highs are high, and it’s safe to say that getting my acceptance two days from the national deadline into my dream program was better than Christmas, Easter, and my birthday all rolled into one.

I do not posit that grad school will solve my problems. Rather, it will probably bestow me with new, terrifying ones that my mind cannot even conceive of at the moment. But that’s okay, because this is the start of career that will doubtlessly be far more rewarding.

Stayed tuned as we gradually move from “what do I do with this B.A. in English” to “I am in grad school and going insane!”