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Living Dream

My thoughts immediately turned to J and young people like her when I read this news about current mortgage interest rates. J moved from the comfortable confines of her university campus to a big city for her first job. The day she landed at her one month rental from the airport, she was physically and emotionally exhausted. It was pouring rain outside so she could not go out grab something to eat. I was relieved when she called me but the level of overwhelm was unlike anything before. This was her first foray into the real world and nothing was nearly right never mind perfect. Unless things change drastically in the next few years for young people like her starting out in life, the dreams of home ownership, family building and the rest will be hard to attain. 

Everything is relative to where a person started, their expectations for themselves and the dreams they allowed themselves to dream. This was one of those days when a maternal pep-talk was woefully inadequate - the realities of life were too big to be talked and hushed away. I tried to tell J that she was living the life of the prototypical young woman in popular literature - out in the big city with their first job, trying to make their dreams come true and fighting for their place in the world. We could think of a dozen movies where the protagonist went through the same rite of passage as her. It's just that real life is way more unadorned than they show in the movies and she was living it in real time unable to find the glamor it in. 

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