Anyone who knows me knows that I love telling secrets and playing games. In fact, one of the most feared Meghanisms among my friend group is "Let's play a fun game!" Recently, I have been bullying my friends into playing a new game with me. It's called "If My Life were a Pinterest Page..."
The premise is simple but the possibilities are endless. Essentially, you imagine where your life will be 5-10 years down the road but through rose-colored glasses. (Pinterest-colored glasses?) You don't think about crippling student loan debt or having to uproot your life and move across the country for your finance's new job. Instead you focus only on the frilly little details, like how you are going to design your first apartment so it looks like something out of a Crate and Barrel catalog, or how you will throw sophisticated yet raunchy dinner parties for all of your chic urban twenty something friends. Questions about budget or functionality are strictly against the rules and if you interrupt the fantasy with something practical, then you lose the game.
As college Seniors, we are at a pretty miraculous age. Our lives are mostly fantasy and possibility and the world is our oyster. We are just close enough to adulthood to be able to get extremely invested, however not close enough to fully understand the challenges that accompany the glamor. I spend an obscene amount of time worrying about my future and I spend even more time idealizing it, creating a glossy and perfectly curated version of my life. Now that I think about it, this game is a lot like lifestyle blogging. Scrape away all of the day-to-day drudge and worry, pick out only the prettiest details of your life, add a couple of filters and a caption then bam, you've got a blog entry. However, this is not the way the world works.
Sure, you can buy furniture and throw dinner parties, but that will not be what occupies the majority of your time. Unless, of course you are lucky enough to be a professional lifestyle blogger, in which case I want your life. Even then those perfect posts are only a snapshot, a fragment. They aren't real. They are, however, really fun to look at. So I am going to keep reading about the beautiful lives of these beautiful women and I am going to keep playing my little game of possibilities because I am at the age where I can. We twenty somethings have the great privilege of being in a state of transition. As we are now, we are close enough to feel the heat but not close enough to get burned. It's a precarious position, but also a pretty magical one. Who wouldn't want to escape for a minute into a world that's all possibility and no practicality?
I love my new game and I will continue to play it without guilt and without worry. Never, however, at the expense of reality. I will keep my head in the clouds, but make sure that my feet stay firmly planted on the ground. At my age, that's all anyone can ask of me.
