Our 20s can be so confusing.
When I was a teenager, I was excited to finish school and have more freedom to pursue the dreams I dreamed for myself. I’d heard people say the famous phrase ‘don’t be in a hurry to grow up.’ And to be fair both back then, and now I can understand why. I don’t fantasize that much about growing older and creating a family yet because I feel like these years — my 20s — are supposed to be some of the best years of my life. Even though this sounds awesome, I think it is also the source of a lot of mental health problems people face in their 20s.
Firstly, I believe it’s a privilege to be able to live through our 20s. Even though probably most of us are aware of how amazing life can be, this exact expectation creates a strong sense of urgency, which can then transform into anxiety, pain, or even some kind of mental paralysis.
How?
Well, in my head part of the problem lies in the way that media portrait how we should be spending our 20s.
“This is the time to follow your dreams! You don’t have any responsibilities now — you only live for you. This is the time to hustle. Achieve your potential! Run after your goals. Create the life you desire. Become the best version of yourself. Party, meet new people. Go skydiving, see the world, fall in love, get your heart broken… live!!!!”
I get it — and weirdly I agree with most of what is being said about our 20s. I do believe indeed that now we are free in ways we might not be in the future, or were not in the past. I agree that we now probably have fewer responsibilities than we might have later on in life. I agree that we should go out there and experience the world. However, the way in which this wanna-be lifestyle is promoted to us, makes us (or at least it makes me) feel like if I do not do everything all at once, all perfectly, and all with a pinch of craziness and at the same time maturity, then I am failing the best years of my life.
I think the scariest part of all of it is the expectation of what our 20s should look like. And anything that falls short of that, is a waste of our time, or a shame, or a disappointment. Time is an interesting aspect of life. Furthermore, when we use other people's timelines to account for how well we are doing, we might end up feeling unsatisfied our whole life. Achieving our potential or our goals or becoming who we want to become don’t really have a universal timeline.
You never stop becoming. You become every day. For as long as you live. And so is achieving your goals. You set goals, and once you achieve them, you set new ones. Your potential is a beautiful concept of all that you can accomplish and be. And this, as well, has no timeline. You choose when to start, and you choose how you’ll go about it. It isn’t some goal you should be aiming to achieve by the time you reach your 30s.
Pop culture and the stereotypical ideal life it portraits for people in their 20s make it seem as if by the time you live your last day as a 29-year-old, you must have life figured out, you must already be prepared to create a family, you must have traveled and met new people, created a bunch of businesses, completely healed your inner child, and learned how to deal with the world. It’s almost as if your life ends after 29 — and a new life begins at 30.
But I don’t think this is even remotely the case. The same way people keep becoming and developing throughout their life, there is still space for us to travel when we have a family, see the world both in our 20s and later. We can change careers at 35 or even at 48 if we want it bad enough. We can fall in and out of love and then in love again at 40, and then again we might never even start a business or get promoted. We might learn our greatest spiritual lessons when we are 49 and we might never fully understand how to deal with the world — and realize that all we can do sometimes is let things be.
In case I didn’t make it clear by now, I just feel like there is so much pressure about what we’re supposed to be doing in our 20s that it sometimes makes it impossible to even begin pursuing what we truly want to do right now. It’s as if our brain is so overwhelmed it makes us just freeze. And instead, we spend our days watching a bunch of Netflix series, watching other people’s inspiring videos, and thinking “I’m a failure. I’m doing nothing like that and I'm already 21. Will it ever happen for me?”
I want to create things, go out there, experience, and fail — but I’m so overstimulated — I don’t know where to start.
If anyone in their 20s is reading this I just wanna tell you that we will figure it out. There’s a cool song that says “Slow down, you’re doing fine. You can’t be everything you wanna be before your time.” And I couldn’t agree more. I guess all we can do is go where we feel most excited — and do what excites us and brings us joy. As Mel Robbins says, what excites you is not random — so let’s go after that — each of us at our own pace. We should also talk about how everyone’s dreams are different, and how a different or unconventional dream is as important and valuable as the one's portrait by the mass media.
On that note, I just hope that we all have the grace to be grateful for our journeys, even the hard parts of them.
