Being a 'Boomerang'

We’ve all heard it in the newspapers, radio stations, online etc, the Crisis of the Boomerang Generation. And we all know why it’s happening so I’m not going to go into the well-covered, hotly argued, very depressing statistics that explain why so many of us keep returning to the nest we were so keen to fly away from x years ago. There are, obviously, pros other than financial for living at home. For instance, it’s quite nice having somebody else cook your dinner every now and then, you’re not the only person who takes care of the laundry and the kitchen table becomes your in-house Book Club. I can pursue my creative ambitions without the worry of rent hanging over my head; I do not miss the monthly, ‘oh dear Lord am I going to make it?’ as I looked at my bank account before rent was due to leave.

But what isn’t talked about so much is the guilt that accompanies all of this. I feel guilty. I’m living off my parents, rent free, I don’t work 40 hours a week because I’m trying out a mixture of temporary and part-time work meets Chasing The Dream. You can’t argue with the sense behind it all but The Guilt is terrible. When I visit friends who aren’t living at Home, who are being Independent Adults, I feel much like a Child again. At a friend’s yesterday, I felt reminded that she was achieving the milestones of her twenties much faster than I was. But of course, I was forgetting her parents have bought the house she lives in and rent out the other rooms. She has had a helping hand. Her parents don’t live in London, mine do. Perhaps were hers in the city and mine not, the roles would be reversed. And she isn’t chasing an unlikely-to-work-out, dream Career.

But in our day-to-day lives, we do often forget the real sense behind things, the reasons why one friend is having it easier than another and why our own lives aren’t as stable as the person’s next to us. We love to judge ourselves against our peers’ achievements, forgetting their own failures and sacrifices. But I choose this life, I chose to turn my back on a stable income in my mid-twenties and to instead run at what was really important to me, the life that doesn’t have an easy step by step guide to it. If it means living at my parents’ while I try and achieve these things then fine, because you never know, I might just get there. In which case, I’ll have been really glad I’ve made that sacrifice of my early adult independence for the chance of unlikely creative success.

In the meantime though, it is a case of remembering that every time the guilt raises its ugly head. Still, I can’t spend too much time thinking about that today, I’m off to the cinema now. With my folks. And no, I’m not paying. Perks, eh?