The Young, the Scrappy and the Hungry. Which one are you?

Greetings, unfriendly world. Before we get into this blog, please allow me to introduce myself. Hello, To Whom it May Concern, my name is Teresa Buzzoni. I graduated from Syracuse University just this month (in December), a semester early from college. No, this is not a brag, but actually a really challenging question that I’ve attempted to navigate on my own, because I found that there aren’t too many resources catered to my demographic. So, I am here to give you my best shot at detailing the challenges facing me as a young professional and early graduate, and share some of the solutions that I hope to find in a world where we need to communicate more about the problems facing us and solve them together.

For a little insight into my life, I consider myself to be a Scrappy, but more on that later. I am fresh out of college and moving to Greenville, South Carolina for my first ever “big girl'' job. I am getting benefits for the first time in my life, but still can’t afford to own a car. I have a college degree, but let’s not talk now about loans and the state of the national private education cust, because that’s a can of worms. Those are not our problems for right now. We’re immediately concerned with how best to put food on our tables and afford the rooms in which those tables sit, all while setting ourselves up for driving Porches and Audis in the future.

I’ve learned that there are tons of problematic things with that vision--i.e. Capitalism, responsibility, emotional awareness, empathy, I won’t even get into the patriarchy--but let’s consider the immediate understanding of the goal. You want the physical things that money buys that produce comfort, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong in searching for that way of stability. When you leave the nest for the first time, you are without a safety net. You need to consider your financial safety, personal safety as well as balance that against the long term goal that will improve your outcome: graduate school, starting a business, promotions and all of the above. In order to do that, however, growing up and growing successful means that you have to get much, much more comfortable with yourself.

In attempting to understand where you fit into the world around you, I classified three of the outlooks that I’ve frequently seen of college graduates to be: the Young, the Scrappy or the Hungry. Let’s sit down with each to understand how important they can be to making it in this big, scary (and might I add… incredibly expensive?) world.

Meet The Young. If you are The Young, then chances are you’re reading this blog too little too late. Maybe you’ve made many choices that you regret, or are in a situation that’s less than ideal. This is the person who is naive to or sheltered from the hardships of the real world and refuses to take accountability for their actions in solving them. This person believes that the world is evil and no one is nice to give them handouts. They are mad at everyone, because they worked for three or four years in college and found that the finish line has no shiny confetti cannons to welcome them into success-ville. I’m here to tell you that if you’re feeling any combinations of these moods, you’re alright and justified to feel them. I certainly did, but they never helped me grow or solve the problems that suffocated me.

You have been living in an environment catered to making you feel like you are one-in-a-million. Whether or not you worked an office job to make grocery money, or came from a wide variety of backgrounds, we all have been shielded from the real world in some way. Being unable to accept this is a pitfall that will only hinder you in the long run. So, I encourage you to accept that even if you are naive to the world, that if you are reading my thoughts on the matter, perhaps you’re more open to winning than you thought.

Category number two. Drumroll, please! Hi there, I’m Hungry. There are many different types of hunger. Just as you might feel like a burrito on one day or beef teriyaki on another, being hungry comes in many different shapes and forms. A hungry person is ruthless, cunning and will do anything to advance in the arbitrary classifications of success. They often take any handout available to them and sometimes even bite the hand that feeds them. You might have thought of someone from your past in particular when you considered them. The problem with these people is that sometimes they can be ruthless, or potentially they just seem cold and unmoving. I’m talking about the people that appeared (on the falsity of LinkedIn or boisterous lies) to walk directly into a job making 80k, and leaving you wondering what you did wrong.

However, you need to hear me when I say, you have done absolutely nothing wrong. That person is not more entitled to any opportunity greater or worse than you. They might have an entire host of challenges and shortcomings which, just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Just because life served them differently does not mean it should be taken away from them whether you believe that they deserve it or not. However, fixating on a hungry person is only going to starve you of yourself. Wondering and watching only what they are doing takes an hour too many away from you buckling down and figuring out your dreams and success for yourself.

This is, because, I hope that you are Scrappy. I’m trying really hard not to be the Young and scared twenty-one-year-old girl who is shaking in her boots, having to do life on her own, or the jealous Hungry that is frustrated by my own struggles. I hope to have developed one of the emotional compasses that in the past twenty-one years will steer me in ‘the right’ path. I’m also a person who believes that the only way to make a positive impact on this world truly is to remain true to compassion, empathy, honesty and courage that I believe to be the only clean words left in this world. So, by that mindset, I’ve self-classified in a hope to become scrappy.

Scrappy, the final and most important archetype means that a person will stop at absolutely nothing to make their situation work and thrive. In consideration of this, I’ve decided to write this blog and share my fears in the hopes that others will be figuring it out just like me, and my success will do nothing but bring us all up together towards a place of no fear. In endeavoring to take the situation where I am not making as much as I had hoped for, and potentially needing a second job just to pay the bills and say F it. I’m smart and I’m going to make it, because nothing else matters.

So, to my friends who are deciding what type of person they want to be, I really do believe that the truth will set you free. It’s going to be absolutely painful—the realization that nothing is going to be given to you once you finish the struggle that is college, there will just be another struggle waiting around the corner. Maybe life won’t be a financial struggle, but one of loneliness, self-doubt, fear, or any other range of emotions. However, I do believe that it is your choice how you handle it, and if perhaps reading my struggles and blog makes life a little less daunting, please, hang out with me for another sentence longer. That’s a pretty scrappy behavior of you to do, and I’m super glad that you’re at least engaging with me, another 21 year old girl entering the world and just choosing to make the best of the world that you’ve inflated to be the boogie man, but maybe is just really afraid of itself too.