Real Life free essay sample

â€Å"Oh, and another thing is that you get to walk around naked anytime you want.† I half snorted, half laughed as I leaned back against my pillows, pressing the receiver to my ear. â€Å"Uh, awesome. What else?† â€Å"Well, it’s just nice getting to make your own choices. Whether they’re smart or not. You get to control your own life. I mean, yesterday I was craving pizza at, like, 2 AM so I went out and got some down the street. Didn’t take me more than five minutes.† He paused. â€Å"It was pretty cool.† As my older brother, who graduated from college the previous spring and lived in Brooklyn, continued to rattle off the perks of living in New York City, I glanced over at my night stand. Royal purple brochures and booklets with glittering skyscrapers and taxicabs blurred with movement on the covers strewed the desk, and a map detailing every campus building and street name within Greenwich Village encompassed the wall behind it. We will write a custom essay sample on Real Life or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I closed my eyes and pictured standing in one of the photographs on the brochures, feeling the gusts of thousands of people jostling and moving in a pandemonium around me that were so familiar, yet distant. Only a few more years before I get out of this place, I thought to myself. I had not envisioned my life to unravel the way it was currently. As I spent my days dreaming about moving to the other side of the country, I dismissed what I saw as the monotony of my sheltered suburban neighborhood, the conformity and close-mindedness I witnessed from my peers, and the suppression of my parents’ household rules- You have to be home before ten-thirty. Get off the computer, you need to sleep. You can’t have friends over when we’re not home, what were you thinking? â€Å"Why New York?† my friends would ask, puzzled by my constant drive. â€Å"I just love the vibrancy and energy of it all. I want to hang out in coffee shops all day and go on adventures like they do in Friends, you know? I want to work in an office with a view of the Empire State Building as a journalist or creative director of something and see new things and meet new and interesting people. I can’t wait for real life.† But does real life begin at a single point in time? Does it start at the second I blow out my eighteenth birthday candles, or when I sign my name on the lease to buy my first apartment? Did I expect fireworks to erupt from the sky and a gleaming path to happiness to be laid out in front of me the moment I set foot in my dream city? I had wasted years of my personal development, significant years that I overlooked in favor of a future that holds more opportunity for me, but which I foolishly idolatrized. I still long to sow the seeds of the city’s eclecticism and culture, to cultivate them into a blooming life, to finally be free. But I now realize that I, not my surroundings, determine whether my life blossoms or not. I see the golden trophy in the distance, shimmering in its perceived glory, but the hurdles I impatiently leap over to reach it are not what delay my life from beginning. These hurdles are my life.