How to Be Twenty-Something

If you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in that

Photo by Kyle Kioko on Unsplash

“It’s not that you were incomplete, it’s that you were exactly as worthy as you are now, you just lacked the ability to see it.” — People Watching(Youtube series)

A year ago, around this time, I started writing on this blog, without really knowing what I actually wanted to write about. As a writer blessed with the writer’s curse, sometimes my mind wanders a lot. For me, writing has always felt like a call-back from all that wandering. Like placing thoughts somewhere outside of myself so they stop echoing so loudly in my head.

As I write a book I'm working on, I’ve also been thinking that maybe writers are just people with multiple versions of themselves, and those versions reveal themselves through the characters they write. A piece of them gets to exist in the world. That’s why I like art so much, because it is literally a part of someone they’ve allowed you to keep. To see. To experience. To feel.

Life got in the way, which seems to be the most commonly used phrase in the language of adulthood. And as someone who’s still becoming an adult, I’ve found myself wishing there was a textbook for it. A manual. A step-by-step guide explaining what to do when everything suddenly becomes your responsibility or always demands your attention, your money, and your precious time.

But as the days go by, as you meet different people and visit new or sometimes old places, you begin to understand why there can never be a textbook on adulthood. Because adulthood does not come in one colour, it is not the same for everyone.

You’re born, you go to school, and there you’re told what to do. You’re taught where you align most. You discover what you’re good at, maybe sports, journalism, academics, music, or art. You learn things about friendship, ambition, heartbreak, and survival. Then suddenly school ends, and the world looks at you expectantly.

Get a job. Make money. Figure it out.

Welcome to the real world.

As chaotic as it may be, no one truly prepares you for the unpredictability of life after that. Yet somehow, you are still expected to know what you’re doing.

And sometimes maybe you do.

Maybe you find the thing you always wanted to do, and you study for it. Maybe you were simply born good at it. Maybe you end up in the corporate world, becoming another exhausted participant in the “matrix.” And for some people, maybe that life genuinely fits.

But sometimes, if you’re lucky or unlucky, you decide to follow your heart instead. You choose the uncertain thing. The dream that sounds beautiful in your head but terrifying once it starts becoming real.

And God forbid you have supportive parents who trust you enough to let you chase it.

Because then you actually have to try.

It starts out difficult, sometimes almost unattainable, and the only thing that keeps you going is remembering why you started in the first place. For whom? For what version of yourself? The secret, I think, is finding your anchor. Something that reminds you who you are whenever life begins pulling you in different directions.

I haven’t written on here since February, and even when I wrote that article, my heart wasn’t entirely in it. The fear of perception still followed closely behind me. Quietly and patiently.

No one warns you that following your dreams can be frightening.

Not because of failure, necessarily, but because of visibility. Because one day the thing that only existed privately in your mind suddenly exists in the real world, where people can judge it, misunderstand it, consume it, ignore it, or even love it. And somehow all of those possibilities are equally terrifying.

As a woman in her early twenties, I know I still have time, or at least that’s what people keep telling me. I know I don’t have to have everything figured out all at once, all in one sitting. But every once in a while, I still find myself thinking about how adulthood feels like waking up every day only to solve a new problem. A new version of yourself to love or leave behind. A new fear. A new environment.

It feels like constantly trying to find yourself while the world keeps demanding versions of you before you’ve even had the chance to fully become one or fully commit to one.

And if you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in that.

In the expectations. In survival. In productivity. In the comparison. In the endless pressure to become someone before you even understand who you are.

But in all that figuring it out, sometimes you also forget to notice how far you’ve actually come. Progress can feel painfully slow when you’re living through it. So slow that sometimes it feels invisible.

A character in a show I’m watching talked about how, in their twenties, the bad days always seemed to last forever. A bad day felt like a bad life. A bad week felt endless. But looking back now, she realised that the bad day had only been a small part of an otherwise beautiful week. And that bad week? Only a small part of a good month, she had forgotten she was even having.

It reminded me how easy it is to forget presence.

How easy it is to focus so hard on what is missing, uncertain, or not yet working that you completely miss what is already unfolding around you.

The small wins. The soft moments. The laughter in between. The people who stayed. The version of you that kept going despite everything.

If you get the bad days, just know they are not going to last forever. They will pass, even if slowly. And if you get the good days — the good weeks, the beautiful little moments that feel light for once, try to be present in them. Let yourself experience them fully so you do not forget that even the process of figuring life out can still be beautiful.

Maybe your twenties are not meant to be polished or certain. Maybe they are supposed to be messy and confusing and beautiful in equal measure. Maybe this is the decade where you learn that becoming is not a straight line. That healing is not linear or aesthetic. That dreams evolve. That people leave. That some stay. That you will outgrow versions of yourself over and over again.

Maybe adulthood is less about having answers and more about learning how to live with the questions.

And maybe that’s okay too.

Then again, what do I know?

I’m just another 20-something-year-old trying to figure it out as well.

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