An ongoing conversation on purpose and growing through our twenties in a big city, with Victoria Reeser.

What am I doing? What should I do in the interim period between being where I am (point A) and where I might want to be (point B)? And what if I don’t know exactly what point B consists of, or whether, how, and when it might be achieved? These questions fell out of me and sat on the table between Victoria and I and our hot chocolates. We looked at them, and they stared back blankly.

My friend Victoria didn’t answer immediately. “Give me some time. I’ll write up something for you.” Later in the year, she emailed me a piece about what to do ‘when no opportunities seem to be striking’ or ‘when you are content where you are now, but want to feel confident you’ll seize the right opportunity when it comes your way’. It was perhaps the first time someone had engaged with my question in a way that sought to give a concrete answer, rather than just provide a sort of comfort. I read her piece three times, blinking back tears. You can read it here. This interview provides some context to the piece.

Victoria was born in Philadelphia, where she grew up in alternative education and was a “deeply suspicious” child. By alternative education, I mean her and her younger sister sprawled out on the dining table, heads in textbooks, taught by their mother. “My sister was always very chatty”, she tells me, “whereas I was suspicious of other children. The fact I have friends makes my mum very grateful. I did not have friends growing up”. 

At 18, having never been to school (at least not in the traditional sense) but loving education, Victoria found herself at community college, which she describes as, “a place you go you go either when you don’t know what you want to do at uni, or you can’t afford uni, and I was in both camps”. While she was there, her supervisor encouraged her to look at the University of Pennsylvania, something Victoria had never considered. Victoria didn’t get in. She worked for a year and applied again, and this time her application was successful. 

Arriving there was “a total culture shock,” she tells me. Her flatmate wouldn’t flinch at spending £500 on a casual day out shopping. Victoria was anxious, completely out of her comfort zone, and working three jobs. She loved it, but also constantly felt she “didn’t know what was going on”. After hours, she would occasionally attend classes run by her House Dean (the accommodation block manager) who was a Professor at the art school there. “I don’t know how to put these colours together,” she told him, painting for the first time. “You clearly do” — his short response.

“I wish more people spoke about when you leave uni and it’s your first year being an adult. It’s so hard. You don’t know what’s next, you’re probably living in a hole in a wall with too much carbon dioxide, you have very little money, and you have no structured social life. It’s incredibly disorienting. And, if you’re starting a new job, you’re having to learn something from the beginning.”

“Do you think the only way to figure out what you want to do is to try things out?” I ask her. 

“Sure, if you want to know.”

“You might not want to know?”

“I would say it’s pretty common to not want to know.” Victoria speaks about the small town she grew up in and a restaurant she worked in as a teenager. “I worked with the same people who had been there a decade before me and are still there now. They go to the pub, they go home.”

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Victoria worked in international development for a year, but she still didn’t feel it was exactly what she was looking for. She applied for graduate school, was accepted by the University of Cambridge, and moved to England with her husband.

Her husband was working late nights, and Victoria found she was lonely. The ‘what should I do’ and ‘what am I doing’ questions grew particularly strong. “I needed to distract myself; I needed to do something with my hands”. Thinking back to her House Dean and his art classes, Victoria bought herself a set of paints from Poundland, and in “the gloom of not wanting to be alone”, Victoria painted. Sometimes, an audio book would cut into the silence. “My House Dean taught me about appreciating what you are working on at the moment, and not focusing on anything else. I’d think: I won’t be doing this forever, I like this, and I should appreciate this”, and it would calm her.

We can take steps to act in ways that will help us work towards these questions about purpose. But we can also paint and appreciate the present when the questions feel particularly pressing. Things can be a ‘yes, for now’. Victoria and I talk about Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and how two characters shout ‘now is now, next time is next time’ with delight as they cycle over a bridge in the setting sun.

We’re lucky enough to have the headspace to even think about some of these questions: how lucky we are that we might get to decide what we do now, and what we do next. Victoria’s piece ends with the lesson ‘pass it forward’. So, here I am. Victoria has given me permission to share her piece with anyone who might benefit from reading it.

Find a version of Victoria’s piece here: www.pantoscope.co.uk/lessons-from-victoria

Follow Victoria’s painting journey on Instagram @thevictoriagallery. ∎