#let alone everyone on this hellstire

[greatwyrmgold]

On an unspecified date in 2024, I will turn/have turned 30. (Depending on when this falls off my queue.) A new decade for me.

I know it's foolish to compare my Millennial accomplishments to those of my Gen X parents, but I can't help myself. At age 30, my parents had two children in elementary school, a house in their hometown, my dad had started working at the company where he's now a manager, and while my mom's career was slowed by the aforementioned children, she was taking strides in the right direction.

Me? I spent several years failing to find work that actually uses my first degree. I submitted hundreds of applications and got a handful of interviews. One pandemic later and I've got a new degree; hopefully this works out. Maybe I'll finally be able to start adulting. If I get a job with a decent salary, I might even be able to afford a studio apartment in town.

Hell, even comparing myself to some of my peers makes me feel behind. The girl who lived across the street when my parents were 30 now has two kids of her own, a successful career, and ran for mayor last year. (She lost, but it was a pretty close race.) Or look at my little brother, who's been working at the sort of job he initially went to college for for years. And he's not living in a relative's spare bedroom.

Intellectually, I know the path I tried to walk—go to college, get a mediocre job, work your way to a good job, white picket fence, etc—was precarious enough for past generations and practically vanished by the time elder millennials came along, let alone 90's babies like me. But somewhere deep inside me, I feel like I should have been able to do that, or at least started my full adult life before 30. I've been a legal adult for more than a decade, but I'm still not an independent adult.

And it makes me conscious of all the little privileges I have. If I didn't have a loving, supportive, sufficiently affluent family, I would be SOL. But I do! I've got parents who were willing to let me stay in my old room for several years, grandparents who let me move in when my parents kicked me out and helped guide me to a new career path, enough of a safety net to spend most of my savings plus some student debt on more years in college. I had enough support from my family to accumulate significant savings when I had shitty or no jobs.

And look what I did with that support.

This post wasn't supposed to be this morose. And I'm not looking for pity or anything. I just wanted to vent.