The Search for Realistic Role Models/ “Comparables”

My father works as a realtor and often talks about finding a “comparable” for a house that’s on the market. It’s a way to make an educated guess about how to price a unique house: find another recently-sold house that has similar qualities – similar age, similar neighborhood, similar features – and use that to assign value to the house you want to sell.

And we are tying to sell ourselves, aren’t we? At least, we’re trying to stage and photograph and market and maintain our lives (just as you would a house) to entice others to invest in it; invest in us.

I’ve had some great female role models in my life – but not a lot of comparables. No older women in my family have lived a life anything close to mine. So it’s hard to feel that I’m doing anything “right;” it’s tricky to assign value to different aspects of my life.

Of course, a person will always feel this way, trying to compare their life -- their values, their choices, their circumstances – to someone else’s. People of my generation are especially prone to feelings of inadequacy. As it’s been widely reported and written about, we are the first generation in modern American history who will, in large part, not live a better quality of life than our parents. Many of us won’t even come close.

And perhaps that’s okay; that’s how it’s destined to be -- the pendulum swinging back, as they say. But if we don’t regularly take stock of this, we will constantly and subconsciously hold ourselves to those unreachable standards, while struggling to keep our anxiety and our debt under control.

My father was one of four brothers; my mother and all three of my aunts were stay-at-home moms Domestic Operations Managers* throughout my childhood. Both my grandmothers had worked as teachers, but because “they wanted to, not because they needed to.” Or at least, that’s the narrative I believed. I’m sure that income came in handy.

(*Yes, the acronym would be DOMs and I’m cool with that.)

A lot of who I am is because my mom was around to read to me, play music for me, and make costumes for me and my sister.

But my life does not, and will not, look like my mother's. Roughly around the time I turned 30, I unearthed a rather uncomfortable subconscious belief: I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been operating under the assumption that I would, like my mother and aunts and grandmothers, be able to quit working full-time once I got married, if I wanted to. I could then do work that I cared about, and not have to worry as much about the pay.

By subconsciously creating that “light at the end of the tunnel,” I had created the tunnel itself. My adult working life was a temporary tunnel to get through, with marriage at the end of it. Only by facing the possible reality that I would live my 30s (and 40s?) just as I had my 20s – largely single, and struggling to keep my head above water – did I realize what I’d done. I was horrified at myself. Theoretically, I wanted to work and earn my own money, but I had no real plan on how to support myself (or a child) indefinitely, comfortably, without spousal assistance. How could I have let such an outdated, dependent, and unrealistic mindset creep in and take root so deeply?

The short answer is that, while Work and Love were both disappointing in my early twenties, Love was the less disappointing of the two. As the reality of the endless 9-to-5 slog started to sink in (and I was one of the “lucky” ones, for even having one of those jobs after 2008), Love still held the glittering promises of what could be. So that’s where I started to bank my most earnest hopes and dreams. Yes, my job paid me money in exchange for the stress, but money didn’t make me very happy if I couldn’t be with my boyfriend. And then my boyfriend did what he always told me he would do (he left for California), and then I wasn’t sure what I should want. The onset of the Quarter Life Crisis began, I left everything for Chicago, and the rest is history that I’m still trying to write.

So now, I search for comparables and try to glean insight, while reminding myself that 1. no one is going to have all the answers and 2. I shouldn’t make someone my life coach if I can’t afford to pay them for that work.

But my ears prick up when people talk about women in their families having multiple healthy kids in their 40s. When friends over 35 talk about indefinitely balancing a day job with a side-hustle

AND their art

AND a relationship

AND their mental and physical health

I practically tug on their sleeves, pleading “…. But HOW do you do it without cocaine? Teach me your ways!”

So please, if you’re feeling up to it: share that artwork that you managed to find the time/energy to create, even if you don’t think it’s very good.

Share that awkward dating story that made you want to pull your hair out, wondering when it stopped being fun and romantic, and when it started being a job interview process. (Seriously, that’s all it is.)

Share when Adulting starts to overwhelm you; when shopping for health insurance and car insurance and renter’s insurance and retirement plans starts to make you see cross-eyed, even though you want to feel like a Boss Bitch With Her Shit Taken Care Of.

Share those moments when you actually do feel like a Boss Bitch With Her Shit Taken Care Of. 

Share that event that you’re planning that has nothing to do with baby or wedding showers, or spouses, or kids birthdays. Or, DO share that shower-y shit and keep it real about how it’s work and it’s often not pretty, but it was worth the wait and the good times can outweigh the bad.

Share that thing you did on your own – that trip you took, the house you bought, the dog you adopted -- that you went ahead and did without waiting for “the right person” to come into your life to do it with.

Share the date that you took yourself on, because you deserve it.

We’re all looking for our comparables. Shine your weirdly-colored light so that others can see to keep on sailing. 

***