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I Felt Like a Baby So I Moved Out. Now I’m Just A Broke Baby.
I’ve always thought of myself as an independent woman. I’ve lived at home my entire adult life but I made my own money, paid rent, ran errands, helped my parents out, and so on. It’s very common in my culture for women to live at home until they get married or, you know, shrivel up and die, so even though I got some side-eye from non first generation people I didn’t feel too weird about it. My family’s living space was small: we had a one bedroom apartment and my sister and I shared the room while my parents slept in the living room (I know this is the part where others raise their eyebrows but trust me, parents in the living room and siblings in a room is a super standard immigrant broke-fam arrangement). It wasn’t excruciating and it saved money so I was happy for a couple years, but something shifted.
Every birthday, I have an existential crisis. This isn’t new. I’ve been doing it since I was a tween stressing out about the transition from 12 to 13. It isn’t about looks or wanting to be young forever; it’s essentially about me hitting benchmarks I’ve set for myself because we’re all going to die oh my god my time is running out more and more every day. Anyway, 26 hit me particularly hard because I’d just been promoted around my birthday, and suddenly I was working a more challenging job surrounded by older people and everyone had their…
