Dear Baby: It's All Real
Dear Baby: It's All Real

I don’t know when we decided that places of education are just holding pens, or that anything you’ve done prior to reaching one or more of the milestones that caused the “well wishers” around you to feel that they were finally crossing over into adulthood, was just pretend. I imagine this mentality stems from our dismissal of the experiences of children and youth as lesser than those of battle-hardened adults who know better, and as the period of adolescence has extended over time, so have the opportunities for everyone older than someone else to throw back a cocktail of disdain and nostalgia and vomit it back up disguised as appropriate greeting card messages.

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LifeAshlee LatimerFeaturedComment
On Doing Less
On Doing Less

Then a week passes, then two, and then I realize I haven't cracked open to Bible study book, and I've double-booked my calendar more than once, and I'm wiped from waking up early but not adjusting my bedtime. Almost without my noticing, all of the balls in my court have dropped and rolled far, far away. 

Suddenly—or not so suddenly—I just want to shirk it all and sleep.

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Health, Life, DreamsMelissa WartenFeaturedComment
I Will Take Care
I Will Take Care

Recently on an errand for work I was walking down Fifth Avenue. I was having a nice walk around 5 pm as the day crawls toward its eventual end when a man walked past me carrying a coffee table over his shoulder.

I say this casually, but yes it was a big wooden coffee table, like, for magazines, beverages, resting feet on, you know, a coffee table.

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Life, PoliticsTessa DukeFeaturedComment
Making Time for Yourself
Making Time for Yourself

I'm currently working 10-hour days. Factor in travel and sleep time, and I have approximately five hours to myself during the week. All of which is spent getting ready for work, getting ready for bed… or watching Netflix (a girl has got to decompress, okay?). But the way I’ve been living leaves no room to focus on things in my own life.

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Health, Life, RelationshipsHannah ReedFeaturedComment
22 Things I Learned Before Turning 22
22 Things I Learned Before Turning 22

I’m a believer in constant growth. But so often I feel stagnant and stuck, and it’s only in the looking back that I can see how even the hard, lonely and boring seasons were working things out in me, niggling through me with their magic to reveal truths later, like bluebells nestled under the earth, waiting out winter. I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been learning in the last 12 months; things that hit me brand new, or simply realised with a new depth that hadn’t sunk in before. So here’s a list.

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LifeIssy DaviesFeaturedComment
OUR FAVORITE THINGS: A Playlist for Your Friday
OUR FAVORITE THINGS: A Playlist for Your Friday

As a person who has a playlist for every month, feeling and post-adolescent life event, I was very pleased when That First Year asked me to create one for their Friday Faves series. Friday is a day that tends to bring on a slew of emotions: exhaustion meets excitement, put simply. Friday is day that calls for a two chapter playlist, so I guess that's what we have here. I hope you listen and I hope you enjoy! 

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Our Favorite ThingsLane SasserMusicComment
Making Peace with The Gym
Making Peace with The Gym

I thought paying for exercise was sort of stupid for years. Within my canon of college thoughts that included aspirations of homesteading and going carless, I thought the idea of the gym was backwards—people didn’t need the gym for thousands of years because they exercised in their everyday lives. If we needed to work to pay to exercise instead of just incorporating it in our livelihood—what was that saying about our values? Our lifestyle? Our society? Cue the small existential crisis.

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HealthKirsten WiseFeaturedComment
The Choice Between Digging Deep and Coasting
The Choice Between Digging Deep and Coasting

When I told people I was moving to Belize to volunteer at a Catholic high school, the responses were unique. Some people panicked at the thought of me getting Zika. My parents were shocked, but supported me. Friends were excited for me but also sad, and most of my friends’ parents asked me if it was safe where I would be staying. A select few still don't know where Belize is, or they still think I said Brazil.

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Life, Travel, RelationshipsAlex McGinnisFeaturedComment
I Will Show Up
I Will Show Up

I had never been to a protest before. I had been content, I had been comfortable, I had been quiet in my place of privilege. I had cared, but just enough. I had signed a petition here, donated a few dollars there. I had never acted with any urgency or fear or intention.

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Politics, LifeLiz DeadrickFeaturedComment
My Honest Elevator Pitch
My Honest Elevator Pitch

Although I studied English, I don’t always have a way with words. The scariest question I get is the very first one I am asked on all interviews: Can you tell me about yourself? Although I have my elevator pitch down, I never feel fully satisfied with my answer. In the post-graduate world there is so much more to a person than high school grades and college majors. There is confusion, crying, laughing, drinking, and a lot of second-guessing.

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Career, Dreams, LifeC. CarrollFeaturedComment
On Birthdays and Becoming an Adult
On Birthdays and Becoming an Adult

I turned 23 on a Monday. Twenty-three is that age right on the cusp of true adulthood and nothing says adulthood like having a birthday on a Monday. Twenty-two is forever associated with Taylor Swift and college. Twenty-four sounds like you have a real job with health insurance, or marriage, or at least owning a dog. But 23. It’s just right there in between. Like 11 and 19. What happens when you’re 23? Is it the Cinderella moment? Will my fairy godmother appear and bippity boppity boo! I’m an adult?!

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LifeAndria ModyFeaturedComment
Waking Up
Waking Up

2016 was an election year that changed everything, for myself and for so many others around me. People became divided by their presidential candidates in a heated political climate everyone on every side could call agonizing. Friendships, relationships, and families fell apart. Opinions were turned into angry memes, and after the long-held tradition of keeping your views off social media, finally everybody seemed to know where everybody stood.

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Politics, Life, RelationshipsAmanda BeadlescombFeaturedComment
The Fear of Missing Out
The Fear of Missing Out

I had always thought the “fear of missing out” was that juvenile feeling I got when I was 3 years old and forced to take a nap while my brother, four years my senior, got to play all afternoon. I thought of it as a silly bout of envy that I soon grew out of... until college. My sophomore year, I got my first smart phone. And with it, I excitedly downloaded Instagram.

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Life, RelationshipsHannah ReedFeaturedComment