Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 60

place people describe as “really safe.” At first, it was nice to be home. She went to the gym with her mother. She enjoyed healthy fare at family dinners. As weeks turned into months, however, she began sinking into depression. This was no summer visit. This was her life. She was sleeping in a cramped twin bed in the same room in which she had grown up, the walls painted dark red — a color she had chosen in middle school. “It’s like a little cave,” she says. She went to Target and bought a clothes rack, because her closet was stuffed full of the past — her prom dress, her high school volleyball uniforms, a giant teddy bear. Her parents had always known her as someone with drive, but now they began asking her what she was doing to look for work. She chafed at their concern, even as she understood it; even as she felt bad about feeling irritated. “They are really great parents and they have done so much, sacrificed so much of their time so I can have the best in life, and you don’t want to disappoint them,” she says. “I just felt really helpless.” As her job search continued to yield rejection, she figured she had to do something — anything. A high school friend told her about a hostess job at the Lebanese restaurant where she worked, and Griffin took it. She greets people, wipes down tables, sets down silverware. One afternoon, the manager sent her outside with chalk to draw an enticing message on the sidewalk. As she bent down on the pavement, she made eye contact with a waiter who was outside on a cigarette break. “I look up and I’m like, ‘I have a college degree, and I’m here drawing on the sidewalk,’” she says. The waiter laughed. He, too, had a college degree. She doesn’t blame Obama for her predicament. “How can you blame one person for not having a job?” she says. “I don’t really know how we could have gotten out of this mess. It was all created by years of federal policy.” But politics seems tainted. “I guess I’m going to vote, because I really don’t want the Republicans to get the White House, but it’s more of an anti-vote,” she says. “It seems like the system is really broken. Most people are just really sick of the vitriol and negativity, and not necessarily toward Obama, but just the whole thing. It’s going to be more difficult to get every- ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12