In Defense Of Running Late

Ask anyone who’s met me: I’ve never been punctual in my life.

If the event starts at 8, I’m getting in the shower at 7:45. During freshman year, I discovered that my friends had all made a secret group chat in which they conspired to tell me to show up to events half an hour early. I’ve been known to Uber to class from the Quad in moments of especially poor time management. I show up late to dinner, late to section, late to my own birthday party three years in a row. Time, to me, is a living, pulsing companion — less a friend than an unshakeable stalker, a figure waiting for me in an alleyway, ready to ambush.

My inability to wrangle time has always been hard to explain. Every pop-psychology article on overcoming procrastination, lovingly forwarded by my father, seems to miss the point. I’ve kept a more or less meticulous weekly planner since elementary school. I’m a religious Google Calendar scheduler. An ever-present tan line on my left wrist marks the watch I wear every day. If I were less organized or more careless, my chronic lateness might feel more forgivable. But I know exactly where all the time is going. I just can’t help watching it tick by.

***

This year, as the hourglass of my senior spring rapidly sifts out, I’ve started to run out of time in a far more sinister way.

At a school where nearly 60 percent of seniors go into finance, consulting, or tech after graduation — and still more head straight to graduate school — it might not be surprising that every single one of my close friends already knows what they’ll be doing come fall. As a junior with no desire to do any of the above, it didn’t seem so bad, at first, to not have things figured out. Being directionless was whimsical, even freeing and fun. But as junior year turned to summer, fall, and spring, my complete and utter lack of plans began to look (and feel) somewhat less hilarious.

Within my social circle, my lack of career prospects has made me a sort of curious oddity at best and a cause for deep concern at worst. My blockmates joke that my term-time job as a barista at Cabot Café will come in handy after graduation, and at this point, I don’t think they’re entirely unserious. Meals with well-meaning friends frequently turn into Office-of-Career-Services-style brainstorming sessions.

Even worse, during the past couple months, my friends have given up on the subject entirely, tactfully avoiding the elephant in the room as though any mention of my unemployment might trigger a breakdown. I appreciate the urge to help, of course. But it’s hard to remain calm and self-assured, to treat my lack of direction as a harmless detour, when my friends have become overnight crisis counselors. I feel like I’ve misdiagnosed something fatal: What I thought was a seasonal flu looks, to everyone else, like the bubonic plague.

I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be ahead of the curve. I had grand ambitions to be a writer, or a politician, or a high-powered lawyer. My high school teachers affectionately promised I would lead a country some day, and I agreed (If nothing else, I’ve become far less insufferable than I was at 16). But somehow, in the same Harvard pipeline that produced my McKinsey-bound friends, I took a hard left. I spent my summers at home with my family or at random odd jobs with little relevance to a future career or, once, in the middle of rural Vermont, while my peers moved on to research programs and prestigious internships in New York City.

Certain paths at Harvard seem clear-cut and signposted: the route to being a lawyer, or a project manager at Google, or, yeah, a consultant. I rejected those paths early on, instinctively, certain I had some other, mysterious thing to contribute to the world. Now, at the precipice of my graduation, I find myself staring headlong into an amorphous black pit where my future should be.

So far, I’ve floated passively along the current of my life: After middle school came high school, then college, junctures I had no real choice in approaching. Now, at the first unguided fork in the road, I’ve faltered, paralyzed by the grave task of shaping my own life.

***

I lied. I know exactly why I’m always late. In the hours I should have spent writing papers and applying for jobs, I actually figured it out.

If I start studying for an exam the night before, I’m freed from the specter of excellence and my own crippling expectations. I don’t have to ace it; I just have to pass. Running 15 minutes late to an event pumps my adrenaline just enough to shut off that part of my brain that worries I won’t be charming or social or well-dressed. Running out the clock, I’ve realized, liberates me from the burden of perfection.

Deciding who I’ll be in a few months with the cocoon of Harvard College stripped away, what the first tentative shell of my adult self might look like, feels infinitely more high-stakes than any assignment or formal. Almost involuntarily, I’ve retreated to the coping mechanism I know best. The longer I avoid making decisions, the lower the self-imposed pressure to make the right ones. The less time I have to choose a job, the more I can ignore the blaring alarm bells reminding me how badly I might screw this up.

But ironically, my stalling tactics, rather than narrowing down the world to a set of manageable options, have laid my future terrifyingly, miraculously wide open. I missed the boat for recruiting and grad school applications — the careers I once fled to as a safe haven when adults asked about my post-college plans — escaping from the tyranny of my teenaged self and all her misguided notions of what might make me happy and safe and secure. Paralyzed by my fear of imperfection, of choosing wrong, I’ve inadvertently made the perfect path impossible. Now there’s nothing left to do but forge my own path.

***

I’ve realized over the years that there are some truly serendipitous blessings that come with running late. I miss the train and take an Uber, and my driver, like a prophet, says exactly what I needed to hear that day. I obligingly stop to take photos for tourists in the Yard, sacrificing arriving on time to lecture in favor of a conversation that reminds me how lucky I am to be here in the first place. And by procrastinating my own future, I’ve saved myself from making the most fatal mistake: embarking on adulthood without really considering what I want from it, what’s good for me, what I’m called to do.

One night last October, I hurried down the cobblestones of Lansdowne St. to meet up with my friends. I was running late. Above me, Fenway Park’s green awnings and the neon signs of the bars loomed, blurred out slightly by the homemade vodka concoction I’d just chugged to pregame. I was on my way to make a big mistake, but I didn’t know it yet. (I am, as I write this, surely on my way to making several big mistakes, though I cannot see them yet.) It was raining. Was it raining? I was so giddy, teetering along on too-high heels, frantically texting the group chat that I was approaching, that I wouldn’t have noticed one way or another.

When I passed the flashbulb sign of House of Blues, a tinny wave of music stopped me in my tracks before I recognized what I was hearing: “Landslide,” the Fleetwood Mac version, the mournful soundtrack to my every disappointment, every heartbreak, every moment of intense weakness for the past three years. It was 9:50, and my friends had been at the bar since 9. But for a minute, I stood still in front of the concert hall’s wide-open doors and let the song wash over me, let myself forget the passing seconds, let myself believe I had been divinely preordained to stand here and listen to Stevie Nicks’ gentle warning, just as late as I needed to be, at exactly the right time.

— Magazine writer Tamar Sarig can be reached at tamar.sarig@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @tamar_sarig.