Defeat feels like a 24-hour drive to Boston from Kansas. It feels like eating ramen in a hotel room, watching Erin Brockovich with your mother, and waiting on a phone call. Defeat feels like calculating how much you can afford on top of food and housing. Divide by 12 months. Divide by four weeks. $18 of spending money a week. You wonder how much strippers make in one night, question how far you are willing to go for money, and set your limits because your situation isn’t that bad yet.

Defeat feels like more waiting and sifting through Craigslist apartment ads. All utilities included. A small, cozy room. No drugs, no pets, no couples. LGBT friendly. Serious inquiries only.

Defeat feels likes tours of two-family houses, sticky bathroom tiles, and a roommate who has been in grad school for too long. You shake his hand. It smells faintly of corn chips. Defeat looks nothing like what you saw in the listing. Where is the walk-in closet?

One female landlord tells your mother the roommates are three men who all graduated from Harvard Business School. She tells you that she has a son who is around your age. She shows you the kitchen, the bathroom, the basement, trying to sell them with a hopeless kind of exhaustion many mothers have.

Defeat feels like a first interview. We were very impressed by your résumé and are interested in buying your soul. Are you free tomorrow morning?

Defeat feels like a second interview. Where do you see yourself in five years? As the same bag of flesh you are right now, only five years rotted. What makes you different from the other candidates? You are this bag of rotting flesh, sir. Those are all the questions I have for you, do you have any questions for me? Boxers or briefs?

Defeat feels like a rejection email. Defeat feels like, “Thank you for your interest in our company. Unfortunately….”

Your mother understands the job market is tough, especially because you “didn’t graduate college with a skill,” unlike those engineers. You think writing is a skill and want to prove her wrong, but everything you write is in English and she cannot read it. If you write something good and nobody understands it, is it still good?

You show your family a video of your graduation speech and they laugh, not because they understand what you are saying, but because the audience laughs. That means other people think you are funny. This is why you like awards—you can take them home and show them to your parents and say, look, people think I am good. I didn’t go to college for nothing.

Some strippers make thousands of dollars in one night.

Your mother says maybe you should join the army. You wonder if you are tough enough to make it through basic training. Google “why should I join the army.” Google “jobs for women in the army.” Google “military hazing.”

You wanted to move to Boston because you loved it. Now that you are back, you decide maybe you hate it. You have confused the two emotions before, but that usually happened with people.

You miss sitting on your front porch and waving at people who wave back. You miss when kids walk by your house and wander into your grass. The dry breeze that weaves through brick buildings, carrying the scent of fresh dirt. The police officers that patrol town in pickup trucks, searching for crime that never happens.

You love the idea of humble beginnings, but you don’t feel like you are going anywhere. Your mother watches HBO and drinks the complimentary coffee from the lobby. You sit on the hotel bed and write in your journal, write on your laptop.

You wait on another a phone call and realize your birthday is in two days. You wish for a happy birthday.