Sometimes I feel like I just blinked and I’m already twenty, other times I feel like my childhood was a whole other life ago. Now, fast forward from my birthday five months earlier, and here I am today. I’m still in a little bit of denial that I have stumbled upon a new decade in my life (so thats good), one symbolic of a fresh start into adulthood. I’ve really begun to notice distinctions that I’d like to tell myself are signs I’m growing up.
What it’s like to hit your twenties: I think turning twenty really highlights adulthood, like when I begged my mom to call the doctors for me last week and she remarked, “you’re not a teenager anymore start acting like an adult!”. Sorry mom, but am I really an adult? I feel a lot like I’m too young to be an actual adult as I’m still in school, unable to work a full time job. But, on the other hand I’m no longer living with my parents, they aren’t here to help with everyday life instances. Some days I have no idea what I’m doing or what I want to be when I “grow up”, which becomes even scarier at this age because I ACTUALLY have to make these kinds of decisions sooner rather than later. I’ve really begun to get good at the whole, “fake it til you make it” idea.
Really though, I’m having these existential moments torn between convincing myself, “this literally doesn’t even matter I’m young” and “this is my whole future every decision I make right now determines the rest of my life!”. Scary I know. What I’ve really noticed recently is everyone around me questioning themselves. And so maybe your twenties is really about trying to grow into yourself. It is no wonder as so many new things are beginning at this age and so many comfortable everyday experiences are ending. Maybe we’ve learned this as we’ve lost touch with some of our childhood friends, ones we promised just a few years ago we’d have in our lives forever. Or we ended things with our high school sweetheart, the person we went to with every problem and who we depended on when we just wanted to feel loved. It was nice to have these people. But now we’re all moved out and meeting new people. It’s nice to have these new people too. Still, we can’t help realize the only constant person we’ll always continue to have in our lives is yourself.
Yes, your twenties are weird. We all seem to just be floating by, but in reality we are making a lot of major decisions for our future self, even if we don’t always know it yet. Maybe everything happens for a reason. We’re supposed to fall in love to see the joy in the world, to realize what we want in a partner, to learn to be vulnerable and share our everything with someone else. But we’re also supposed to have our heart’s broken, to feel the pain, to learn from the experience and understand the difference between a soulmate and a lesson. If we’re not drifting from some people we’re not growing up and we’re not changing. If we’re not questioning what we’re doing every now and then or wondering how we can improve ourself then maybe we aren’t fully emerging ourselves in the excitement and confusion that is our twenties.
Perfectly Imperfect 