The Secret to Your Early Twenties

It’s completely normal to go through a floundering period, but you soon realise that if you just stand up – you’re only in knee-deep water.

Today is the 7th of December, and in a week from now I will be twenty-four years old. I’m sure that many of you can relate to me when I say this, but for the first time, I don’t really feel like celebrating my birthday. I know that I’m lucky that I even get the opportunity to go out and celebrate, but I can’t help but feel a little lacklustre about it. This year, for obvious reasons, things feel different. Whilst it feels like my life has been at a complete standstill, my upcoming birthday is a sign that, Coronavirus or not, this year has continued to go on without me. The past few years have been the hardest of my life, and up to recently, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to celebrate what I know will be another challenging year.

When I was younger, I was always looking ahead. The future and all its unlimited possibilities excited me to no end. The prospect of being an adult and free to do whatever I wanted was something I constantly thought about when I was an angsty teenager. I had such a clear vision of what I wanted my life to look like and was so assured that everything would go to plan. Flash forward ten years, and I can safely say that absolutely nothing has gone to plan. In fact, just thinking about my teenage naivety makes me laugh out loud. I cannot stress to you how far removed my current life is from the one that I envisioned for myself. I don’t even think that my thirteen-year-old self would be able to pick me out of a police line-up. Maybe that statement is a tad overdramatic, darker hair and a rounder face wouldn’t have fooled precocious thirteen-year-old me for a second.

One thing that I feel like I have discovered over the last few years is that your early twenties are easily the most difficult years of your life. Which must be one of the world’s best-kept secrets, because I’m sure that I’ve never heard anyone else complain about them before. I just assumed that this time of my life would be easy, and that was my first mistake. If you thought puberty was bad, let me tell you, your twenties are acne and mood swings, but with bills to pay and huge life decisions to make at the same time. I have faced more challenges, made more mistakes and cried more in the last few years than I ever have before. I have watched my carefully laid plans go up in smoke and asked myself ‘What the hell are you going to do?’, so many times that it became my new mantra. I realised that I was heading in a completely different direction to the one I wanted to go in. Time and rejection had caused me to cast my net so wide, that I had forgotten what opportunities I was actually looking for.

I found that a lot of my struggles started after I graduated from university. If you think about it, before this point we’re not accustomed to making decisions about the direction of our lives. We go from nursery to primary school, to secondary school, and some of us go on to university. We have our lives mapped out for us and we always know what the next step is going to be. I really struggled when my path wasn’t dictated to me anymore. The endless possibility of the future that used to excite me as a child became the most daunting prospect of my adult life. What makes this situation even harder, is that everyone expects you to figure it out so quickly, like the decision isn’t one of the most important that you’ll ever make. But let me let you in on the secret of your early twenties, it’s okay to not know what you’re doing, everyone feels like that and you’re going to figure it out eventually. It’s completely normal to go through a floundering period, but you soon realise that if you just stand up – you’re only in knee-deep water. I wish that I could scream this at my younger self (and by that I mean me two months ago). I felt like I was really struggling for such a long time, but I decused to change my perspective. I remembered what it was that I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go and figured out that I could get there! I was making everything so much harder than it needed to be. But everything you want is achievable once you commit to achieving it.

I want to leave you with a little something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. At this very moment in time, you are the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again. I’ve found that it’s a very useful thing to say to yourself whenever life presents you with an opportunity or a problem. Should I book a spontaneous girl’s weekend away? Well, I may never get the opportunity to go again. Am I ready to move out and get a place of my own? I’ve never been as mature as I am at this moment. Try it out the next the time a situation calls for it, let me know what you think.

M x