Flailing, Your 20s, and the Best-Friend Sitcom

It’s halfway through the semester and as the years have gone on, you notice time moves much more violently. When you’re a kid, time moves so slowly that even a short commute to school feels hours long. Now, though, any trips less than 8 hours away? That’s a close enough drive for me.

It’s hitting me that it’s halfway through the semester, which means it’s halfway through my last semester in college (at least in an undergraduate degree… you never know what the future holds). I feel like I’m standing still and time is zooming by, making me an unwilling passenger in a ride where everything speeds up around me. I keep finding myself grasping at time like straws, trying to hold onto the last moments of what feels like my concluding youth.

As a college student, you feel like you have this sanctioned stupidity, where you can mess things up and make mistakes and people will just laugh it off, generally saying that, “it’s okay you’re just a college student.” But in the real world, it’s a little more frowned upon to stay up until 2am singing karaoke on a Tuesday and only consume Sheetz and nicotine from Thursday through Sunday. It’s also a little easier to skip a class to nurse a hangover, or because the weather is beautiful and all you want to do is drive around your mountain town when you’re still a college student.

The real world isn’t as kind to you though, or so I’ve been told. Many adults that come and go into your life will often say the phrase, “your college years are the best years of your life,” or some similar variation, which leaves you to wonder, “if these are the best years of my life, why should I look forward to what’s next?” I’m already nervous about having to figure out a mortgage, and if I’ll even get a job with a communications degree (because a lot of those same adults will question your career choice too), and now I have to think of the impending doom of spending the rest of my life looking to the past.

I know nostalgia hits hard because I’m already nostalgic for my childhood and previous college years (not so much middle school, we can skip those). It especially hits home in the fall when I start thinking about childhood Halloween specials, the homemade Halloween costumes my mom made, and party planning with my friends while figuring out how we can squeeze in pumpkin picking and cake baking into our busy schedules. A bigger reason it hits home is the realization that any mistakes I made then I either know now were insignificant and I was overdramatic, or that I was able to overcome anything I think I did “wrong.” But the looming threat of life outside of being a student is terrifying because consequences seem more real, and mistakes seem bigger.

In the midst of these horrifying realizations, I turn to the best-friend sitcom to save me. I’m a chronic multitasker, and I need something to watch in the background at all times to constantly feed myself full of media. The sitcom, or ‘dramedy' for some, has been the perfect background noise, and in my recent spiralings, I’m realizing that they’re helping me through some of the post-grad anxiety, even if that wasn’t their intent.

Most sitcoms or dramedies follow a fairly similar premise even if the plot isn’t the same. They tend to be about two or more friends who both fail then figure out relationships, or their careers, in the midst of life. In How I Met Your Mother, it took literally nine seasons for Ted to reveal who his kids’ mother was, and all other relationships go up and down in between this time. In Broad City, Abbi and Ilana have dozens of odd jobs and are scraping by for money in New York in pretty much every single episode. In New Girl, the whole premise of the show was that it began as a breakup, and friendships then blossomed from that experience.

Yes, the shows aren’t necessarily realistic (like how none of them seem to ever work even though they all have jobs), but they do provide at least a seemingly realistic portrayal of how people operate. Much of it is exaggerated for comedic effect, but honestly much of life feels comedic as well. In college much of my experience has felt comedic, almost every day with a brand new story that makes me feel like I’m living in some sort of Truman Show sitcom. But, truly sitcoms can prove to be such a basis for the complexities of life and how we never know what is going on, especially being young and in our 20s.

I recently finished watching Girls on HBO and while I have such a complicated feeling with that show (and whether I hated it or loved it), it somehow eased some of my anxieties of being in my 20s and not knowing what I’m doing now or in the future. In watching the show, the character Hannah makes some of the worst mistakes ever and continuously prioritizes herself over her friends. The other characters are honestly not much better (Shosannah is probably one of the only redeeming characters). However, what’s healing about watching it is knowing that you can mess up and fix things and do it all over again because life isn’t linear.

Post-grad anxiety normally stems from this linear life mindset where it’s expected that you graduate, get a job, settle down, and work a corporate job until you retire or die — whichever comes first. So, it’s a sick feeling when the rest of the world is telling you how to operate and do life but you’re flailing and confused, about to be thrust into the world as an adult who is supposed to somehow understand their future.

What’s happened as the days go on and as I try to appreciate my fleeting moments as a college student is that I’ve been using the life lessons learned in sitcoms, or their general themes, as if they were lessons in my classes. So, I am applying a little bit more critical thinking to the essence of the show rather than just taking it in for laughs. These life lessons ease the tension of realizing not everyone has life figured out, just as not every show ends the same way.

Plus, if they’ve taught me anything else, it’s that even post-grad, I’ll be able to keep and find new friends throughout whatever life throws at me, which sounds a whole lot better than knowing what job I’ll land in a couple months.