The 10 Women You'll Be Before You're 35

Alison James

• Publisher: Polka Dot Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781593372774
• eBook ISBN: 9781440518744
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyone - from your mother to your boyfriend - is always telling you who you are and who you should be. But who are you, really, and who do you really want to be? New Graduate; Dollarless Diva; Worker Bee; Party Girl; Body-Conscious Babe; Chameleon; Crisis Chick; Ms. Independence; Wirl (half woman/half girl); True You. In The 10 Women You'll Be Before You're 35, author Alison James takes you on a journey of self-discovery - from wide-eyed ingenue to the real woman you were born to become. You'll learn how to finesse each phase with poise - experimenting with abandon but ultimately keeping only what perfectly fits the True You. With The 10 Women You'll Be Before You're 35, you'll dare to become the woman you never dreamed you could be!

chapter 1

thenewgraduate
so naive you can’t believe!

the new graduate at a glance

nickname
Kid, Dear, Honey, Sweetie

look
Eager, fresh-faced, and way too young to be working.

fashion
Cheap black pants, ponytail, white shirt, and denim jacket. Baseball cap on weekends.

phrase
“When I was in school, we would . . . ”

love interest
College boyfriend, who graduated a year earlier. He has lived in the real world for a while, has a paycheck, and gets passes to exclusive bars.

favorite songs
Senior year mix CD.

events/activities
Dinners she can’t afford, college alumni get-togethers, and trips to visit old friends.

friends
Anyone from school who moved to the same city she did; random people she meets because she needs all the new friends she can get.

life goal
To make it through this job for a year and then, ideally, go back to school.

When her college days come to a screeching halt, the New Graduate is certain that adult life will be grand. She’s convinced that guys will be mature, employers will be thrilled to have her onboard, and friendships will grow into higher levels of sisterhood. With the day-to-day frivolity of schoolgirl life left far behind, a world of opportunity is before her. But in her new postcollegiate life, things aren’t quite as movie-set perfect as she imagined.

Even with paychecks and jobs, the guys are still holding beer pong tournaments. Her new boss can’t remember her name and she feels disconnected from her old friends as they assimilate into their new jobs and lives. Instead of being a calm, collected adult she feels more like a kid on the first day of school again, but this time she’s on her own.

The New Graduate phase is a challenging one full of surprises and “I never thought life would be this difficult” moments. If you’re in this phase now, you know the mixed emotions that accompany it. If you’ve been through this phase in the past, you’re probably thinking “Whew . . . I’m glad I made it through . . . but it would be nice to do it again knowing what I know now.” While you can’t go back and do it again, you can laugh at all the crazy feelings you had and enjoy the New Graduate phase from a more mature, enlightened perspective. This phase is the time in every girl’s life when endless possibilities lie before her and she has the enthusiasm to pursue them. It’s a phase that’s as fabulous as it is frightening. It is a time to remember and celebrate.

Life in the Real World

Here’s what it’s like for the New Graduate: One moment she is sleeping soundly, dreaming of the exciting days ahead as a twenty-something with a paycheck. Then someone comes into her room, whips open the curtains, and wakes her up. She sees her surroundings for the first time under the bright lights of the real world and feels bewildered, exposed, and unpolished. She wonders, “Where the heck am I and how can I be so excited about the future one minute and so freaked out the next?” She feels like she went to sleep a college kid but woke up in an unfamiliar land.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

George F. Will

Like all New Graduates, she feels enthusiastic but overwhelmed, excited but terrified, grown up yet more naive than she was in grade school. This exciting but challenging time is typical of life as a new member of the adult world. When you’re in it, you can expect to feel a number of conflicting feelings that make you a little nutty sometimes.

Enthusiastic but Overwhelmed

No more exams. No more senior-year beer fat. As the New Graduate embarks on the road to adulthood, she is sure she’s going to look great, do her own taxes, figure out what a W2 is, and fall in love with the perfect guy. In short, she’s ready to tackle the world as an adult and get on with her life.

But the real world is more difficult than she imagined it would be. She’s tired of waking up at six in the morning and she’s only been doing it for three months. Her old college boyfriend is being lame, going out with his new work buddies all the time and acting like he’s back in high school. Her closest friends are spread across the globe, so she has to make new ones. And she’s not even sure that the courses she took in college are going to help her get anywhere after all. They seem so impractical now. It’s about this time that she starts to wonder if she should just go back to school and relax in the safety of that environment. But deep down, she knows it wouldn’t be the same.

Job Insecurity

She’s come out of school thinking she knows what kind of job she wants. And she thinks she knows how to get it. After all, she’s smart, educated, and armed with advice from older siblings and friends. She’s studied for four years, and she has all of the book experience she needs. Her professors have told her things like “You’re a very smart young woman,” and “With your talent, you will go far.” And she wants to believe this. She knows she might not get the perfect job right away, but she knows what she wants to do and nothing is going to change that. Right?

The guy who cheated off me
in chemistry makes a million dollars
a year as a basketball player and I
can’t find a job.

Anonymous

Postgraduate Urban Success Legends—
Myth or Reality?

• The girl who took a job at her father’s firm and is already making a six-figure salary.

• The guy who won the scholarship to study biology in Japan and has since cured the common cold.

• The girl who got married to a rich foreign prince the summer after graduation.

• The guy who moved to a Third-World nation to teach English.

• The girl who posed for Playboy and made a million dollars off the publicity.

• The girl who moved to Hollywood and is already making guest appearances on a sitcom.

• The guy who started his own pizza delivery business and sold it to Domino’s for millions of dollars.

On the other hand, she keeps meeting people who ask her the same types of questions: “Where did you go to school?” “What are you doing now?” “Do you like it?” These questions make her start to doubt her choices. This is a tough dilemma for a New Graduate. The truth is, even though she was lucky enough to find a job in her field, it’s really not quite as scintillating as she thought it would be. She feels like she doesn’t fit in. But it’s what she worked four years to achieve! She just can’t walk away now! Can she? To make matters worse, she keeps hearing stories about people who already have their lives figured out. They’re always a friend of a friend, or those people whose success profiles are in the alumni newsletters her mom keeps forwarding to her. Are these stories real, or are they merely postgraduate urban success legends? Urban legend or not, they make the New Graduate feel dull in comparison.

Kid on the Inside

During the New Graduate phase, you’re a full-fledged adult on the outside. You’ve moved into your very own place and have your own bills to pay. You’re adjusting to working an eight-hour business day, and you’re even getting up before noon on the weekends. You have a real job with a real title (even if it’s the lowest on the office totem pole). The nostalgia of your past life is slowly fading, and when you visit campus, you feel like you’re on the outside looking in.

On the flip side, you still feel like a kid. Nothing seems permanent yet. You feel small and lost in your new life. Your boss spends his weekends fixing up his house and you spend yours going out with friends to bars. Every T-shirt you own has a college logo on it. Your proud, hopeful parents gave you an engraved business card holder for graduation but you don’t have any business cards yet. You’re still living on ramen noodles and mac and cheese. You’re in the adult world but not part of it. You’re in your own strange postgraduate limb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The New Graduate (So Naive You Can’t Believe!)
• Chapter 2: The Dollarless Diva (Cereal, Tuna, and a Lotta Debt)
• Chapter 3: The Worker Bee (I Can Do It All, Baby)
• Chapter 4: The Party Girl (Like, Call Me on My Cell)
• Chapter 5: The Body-Conscious Babe (Vitamins and Mineral Water)
• Chapter 6: The Chameleon (I’ll Have What He’s Having)
• Chapter 7: The Crisis Chick (Junk Food and Sleep)
• Chapter 8: Ms. Independence (Empress of the Universe)
• Chapter 9: The Wirl—Half Woman/Half Girl (Call Me Ma’am and You’ll Die)
• Chapter 10: The True You (I Made It!)
• Conclusion