Wait! I don’t want the standard plan. I don’t believe that life suddenly begins in your early twenties and you have to create your future out of thin air. Believe it or not, life has been happening all along. This has been the real world, and I have been shaping the kind of woman that I will continue to be. More than ever, being a well rounded woman is vital to success in your career, and in your personal life. And can it possibly get any harder? Not only do we have to keep up appearances, staying in shape and sporting the latest retro fad, but we have to be on constant alert for new developments in our respective fields of expertise. There’s enough Twittering, Facebooking, and LinkedIn-ing going on to make my head spin.

So with all this chaos, I’m also supposed to secure a romantic future? I’m not sure that’s a top priority anymore. My mother was married at my age - I don’t want to follow in her all-too-young footsteps. The perfect balancing act between life and work may not exist after all, and perhaps it shouldn’t. What’s wrong with immersing yourself in your job in lieu of rushing home to take care of a family? Reflect on the kind of person you’ve always been and see how that person fits into the “real world”. You may want to toss that suburban rule book out the window.

Approaching life after college…

As far as milestones go, today was a big one. College graduation. The speeches, greeting cards, and naïve undergraduates all claim that today is the day that your real life begins; as if we’ve been in a random spiral headed for collision with the real world. You can argue that this is true, but I’ll only buy it in the most literal sense: we’re now forced to accept full time jobs and begin some attempt at self maintenance.

Like many fresh grads, I’m gazing at a blank canvas. There is no longer a schedule of classes or even the temporary summer job. It is just me, and the future, staring each other down. Now the standard plan for the remainder of my life would go something like this: score an entry level job, meet a suitable man, climb the corporate ladder - but only until I get pregnant and/or am proposed to, at which point it’s safe to get pregnant! After that, life just becomes a suburban blur.