my 20s are upon me. in less than four months, i will enter the decade of my life that will lay the foundation for the person i will end up being at 32, 50, 65, and 84. your 20s feels like a steady progression of acquiring all the tools, opportunities, experiences, and overall greatness and exponential growth on how life should unfold. the biggest stressor that haunts young adults is the paralyzing fear of the unknown and the relations of uncertainty. when you nit pick all the different versions and phrases of this fear, it comes down to a simple statement, “i don’t know what i’m doing with my life.”
i hear this sentence on a weekly basis, and on some weeks, i hear it daily from my peers and myself. the ideology of knowing exactly where our lives are suppose to end up like is a societal piece of garbage that is crafted to instigate competition amongst you and the rest of the population. this way of thinking is superimposed into our psyches even before we made our first friend, received our first report card, or earned our first participation trophy as a child.
let’s be real, no one knows what they’re doing with their lives. we can’t illustrate what our lives will look like in four decades-its not something that we have the capability of at this age. pretending like we can predict this life, as if youre thats so raven, cuts off the ability for us to follow our internal navigation systems in opposition of the narrative we paint for ourselves and what we feel we “should” be doing.
you are not responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be. you owe nothing to your younger self. you don’t have anything to prove to the version of you that has evolved and no longer exists. life doesn’t end at 26, and 34 isn’t old, and being in your 50s might be the first time you feel like you’re really living.
fetishizing youth, the romanticization of life before the age of 24, and making it the most mouth watering characteristic a person has to offer does no service to the person you once were and the person you are going to be. just because you wanted things to be different, it doesn’t mean they’d be better; there are tiny miracles happening all around you. notice them.
nothing will ruin your twenties more than thinking you should have your life together already-rome wasn’t built overnight.
with all my love,
♡steff
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