Leaving Home in Zero Easy Steps

By Matthew Hutchings on September 22, 2014

image courtesy of HBO’s “The Wire”

A lot of college students are nervous when leaving home, so allow me to relate my story of departing the nest to reassure you that there is absolutely nothing to be nervous about.

Leaving home is often a time of strain and mixed emotions. For me the experience was equivalent to a small oil slick of radiant joy sitting on top of a lake of uncertainty and malaise.

My reaction to this was to watch every episode of The Wire while plastered. It took roughly two weeks. It wasn’t a cathartic experience, although at some points it possessed elements of a vision quest. I didn’t realize any great truths, except that Detective McNulty is now among my favorite fictional Irishmen and that Rolling Rock, while cheaper than bottled water, is a poor substitute for actual hydration.

On the plus side, it was an efficient method of killing the remaining two weeks until I had to pack up the moving truck and make the leap from one long-belabored situation into something else, with the hope that I was not the proverbial lobster jumping out of the pot and into the flames.

I didn’t want to spend the time imagining or getting my hopes up or hyping it in any way, shape, or form. I wanted to be free of expectations, because if there’s one life lesson I’ve managed to absorb, osmosis-like, through repeated collision with my thick skull it’s that the universe is fundamentally without order and is therefore hostile to preconceived notions.

In fact, I’d like to coin a new law in the spirit of Murphy’s Law. I’d call it Matthew’s Law, and it would state: “Don’t get too worked up. Whatever you show up expecting- it will always be something else.”

The corollary would have to be “the more you expect- the less likely you are to get it.”

I’m convinced it must have been the personal essay that got me in, and if not that, it must have been sheer luck. I had no letters of recommendation, no real ECs, I’d never been an athlete, I didn’t fit into any kind of minority or disadvantaged background, and my grades were… average, to put it politely.

Whatever I said in that essay, and I cannot for the life of me remember what it was, it must have convinced the applications people to give me a shot, because here I am, sitting among a maze of boxes containing all my worldly possessions, having just had my ass handed to me by an innocent-looking blue couch and a flight of stairs.

I had no idea what to expect of this stage in my life. In my mind, all I could picture was giving the folks a hug and getting in the car and leaving for good, and that was about where the daydream ended. Conspicuously absent were any real, hard-hitting thoughts on what my “career” or main source of income would be. I knew I liked to write, and I liked history, and I knew the way my credits were set up. I was pretty much set in my degree path now, barring any unforeseen double majors or minors.

It’s not like the transition snuck up on me, or caught me by surprise. Every second of the four years I spent in community college, all I could think about was leaving Los Angeles and coming back to Santa Cruz, where I was born. Most of the friends I had made in Los Angeles could be safely described as “failures to launch”.

A lot of them are good eggs, don’t get me wrong, and there’s a non-zero chance that I will fail even more spectacularly, but the plain fact is that many of them have stalled out in the post-high school phase. Often it’s not their fault, the money just isn’t there to swing for the increasingly mandatory and increasingly expensive Bachelors.

Some went to a 4-year school, couldn’t adapt and were kicked out for grades and rule violations. Some have convinced themselves that where they are now (in aggregate: taking a few community college classes here and there to keep their family happy, working the service industry for minimum wage, doing odd jobs for neighbors and/or selling drugs) is sustainable for their own personal health and happiness over the long term.

A lucky few are set for life by virtue of being born into wealthy families, and will always have a cushion to fall back onto, whatever the scope and outcome of their endeavors. In my experience, these are usually the ones that crash hardest.

Then there’s me, with just enough grants to cover two years of school, minus books and rent. I get one shot, and screwing up is so catastrophic a prospect that I don’t even worry about it anymore because there is simply no way that I could live with blowing that opportunity.

There will be plenty of motivation to do well, because not doing well is not an option. There is no “insert $40,000 and try again” screen on this arcade game. The government will pump cheap debt onto students to pay for educational fees so bloated they would make a stock broker blush, but they won’t do it for the same student twice, not because it’s unethical, but because it’s bad for business. The economy is in shambles, limping along like a spear-skewered buffalo without the good sense to lay down and die.

At least, as far as producing wealth for the people who turn it’s mighty gears, it is broken. For those upper class chaps that invest and divest like golden fairies in expensive suits flitting from blossom to blossom I imagine life is pretty good. The old markets of capitalism are being fundamentally transformed by technology and by globalism, which means that first they are being gutted and most of the employees sent home or put on part-time status. Creative destruction, or so they say.

This has happened many times before, of course, but now it is happening at such a rate that it is difficult for any person to keep up. At times, watching fiction and non-fiction writers alike struggle to find viable platforms for their work that turn a profit amidst mass newspaper closures, the withering of print magazines, and the general “do it for free or almost free” attitude of the internet, it seems impossible to see a way forward to stability. When the easiest way for a budding writer to feed himself is to write pre-outlined listicles for Cracked at 100 bucks a week, you know you’re in trouble.

One of the greatest unintentional American heroes of any era once said: “We live in cheap and twisted times. Our leaders are low-rent Fascists and our laws are a tangle of mockeries. Recent polls indicate that the only people who feel optimistic about the future are first-year law students who expect to get rich by haggling over the ruins… and they are probably right.”

Thankfully history majors are famous for turning pale and fleeing towards the nearest bar exam when they realize their probable salary, so it’s almost inevitable that two years from now you will see me present among the ranks of the first-year law students, trussed up in some itchy tie and training myself to exact an exorbitant hourly rate for regurgitating dusty statues as decent civilization crashes down around our ears.

And that is what moving away from home is like. So relax! Clearly there is nothing to fret about, save for how to spend the best years of your life.

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