3 Kinds Of Days You Have When You Move Back In With Your Parents
By Max Grobe
1. The ‘happy to not be paying rent’ day.
This kind of day should be indulged in because it is so easy to take free wifi for granted sometimes. Create a Tumblr and start reading newspapers daily because life isn’t so bad. The thrill of opening a fridge to see shelves liberally plastered with superfoods and other stuff you couldn’t fathom buying as a student is a luxury, so go ahead and crack into the organic guacamole. Help yourself to the Guatemalan coffee and clean linen. Co-exist harmoniously with your family and revel in first-world problems. Stretch this day into weeks and stave off confronting anything too seriously. Take Photobooth pictures with your siblings, quit smoking and make an effort to drink eight glasses of water a day. This is the golden time and it is to be treasured because there’s no place like home, but it shouldn’t be forever. The existential ramifications of living at home for too long are paid in installments of a burning emotional rent. It’s like, “Hey, can I write you a check for 3 months of being 22-years old that I’ll never get back again?”
2. The daytime-drinking day.
This is the kind of day when you really focus on fine-tuning your ‘journalistic voice,’ AKA drinking a fuck-load of wine before 3 PM on a Thursday. Maybe it’s a whole bottle to yourself. Maybe you dust off some leftover amphetamines on the back of a Radiohead album and give yourself a homemade tattoo. You sit at a desk trying to rearrange your life or whatever, but instead you call over an old school friend and accidentally eradicate two cases of beer whilst playing video games. Together you make a collective decision to delete your Facebook accounts because they are minefields for bad ideas and finding out stuff you never wanted to. Enjoy the fact that you get to do this at least once in your life. Some acute social regression to when you and your friends knew how to run the world and had it all waiting for you is important for adult functioning because, really, what’s changed?
3. The day you have a meltdown.
This is the worst kind of day. I have had enough semi-self-imagined emotional breakdowns to warrant an inspection for a narcissistic personality disorder. I mean, I’m writing about them right now. If I can’t find the button that magically turns off all my emotions (thanks, British culture) then I’ll usually funnel all the world’s attention into me and my issues for a bit until I get bored. By that point I am usually bored of my problems too so they disappear or become irrelevant. Okay it’s not that healthy and all my surrounding friends and family suffer in a light-hearted way, but, it confirms my slow evolution from a problem child into a problem adult, which feels like progress, and progress is good. However, a breakdown in your childhood bedroom because your life isn’t running the way you wanted it to is very dark and haunting in a pathetic sort of way.
These bouts of emotional diarrhea can be triggered by something as insignificant as one of your parents asking you to sweep dead leaves out of the garage. Suddenly, with an unprecedented intensity your feelings will start being flushed out of you, very quickly and with no warning. Palpable, watery feelings. Force yourself to deal with how you feel in a straightforward way, talk out loud and tell yourself that you’re a brat for complaining. Calmly grab a broom and ask yourself some important questions. ‘Where do I want to go?’ ‘What am I good at?’ ‘How much money do I need to save?’ Check that your passport hasn’t expired and start to get excited about your future again.