Ten Days of Twenties – 22nd Year

In my 22nd year, I began working in the real world. I had graduated from college with a degree in Computer Science and thanks to my dad’s old work connections, I landed a job as a consultant with his old consulting company.  I worked 6 months at a shipping company and then got on with the bank that I work for now.  The spring after I started working, our offices got moved downtown Charlotte and I had made my work goal…work downtown for a bank in Charlotte.  Charlotte is a banking capital and with my dad working in Charlotte as a programmer, I just always saw that as something I wanted to do.

I had a great time working there.  We got to go out for lunch at nice restaurants all the time.  Sometimes we went out for breakfast and of course coffee in the afternoon.  I was working on great projects at the time.  During this year, we finally had some decent money coming in.  The first two years we were married I was in school so I was making like $10/hr only working 15 hours a week so you can see that doesn’t add up to much.  Looking back, I’m not really sure how we easily paid all of our bills.  I know dinners at our parents really helped!

But that year, I finally was able to get some new clothes and quit wearing all the granny clothes, at Scott liked to call them, that were left over from the 90s.  We were in a new century and I was ready to start dressing the part of my new downtown job I had!  The final moment for me becoming an adult and embracing this new time was when I got about 12 inches cut off my hair and I got this cute, new spiky hair cut.

The picture above was taken by Heather on the way home from the salon (I think…again, my old brain doesn’t remember).  I just remember being so proud of my new hair cut.  I felt so…in.  And in my life as a teenager and college student, that really hadn’t happened.  So while a hair cut really isn’t a special event from that 22nd year, it does represent a shift in who I was becoming in the coming years.  I was saying good bye to the shy (ok not totally the shy part) little girl and saying hello to the woman I was becoming.