Things I Wish I Knew at 18

Hi lovelies! I’ve been seeing the trend where people write advice that they wish they knew at a certain age, and while a lot of these are 30-somethings speaking on being 25, I thought I’d share my take as a soon-to-be 21-year-old who’s graduating university. In my opinion, enough significant changes happen between the age of 18 and 21 that there probably is someone out there who might need to hear this. If that’s you, I want to preface this by saying it’s all going to work out. It may not work out how you expect, but nonetheless it will work out and you will be okay. When I was 18, I thought I had everything figured out, and I assumed I could at least anticipate some of the major events of the next few years. Two weeks shy of 21, I look back at my 18-year-old self with love and pride, because although she’s in for the ride of a lifetime, I know she’s going to figure it out. It reminds me of this idea I saw online — you might get older, but you’ll always be every age you ever were. You carry them with you, and sometimes when you feel a certain way or react to something, it’s the 19 or 15 or 11-year-old version of you who’s experiencing that. So in a sense, I’m writing this to my 18-year-old self, with the hope that she and you can feel a little bit better about what’s to come.

Sticking with the message in my introduction, my first note is ‘You’re going to meet a new you several times in your life, but you’ll never forget what it was like to be 18.’ Honestly, this is true in many aspects. I remember how impatient I was at 18, ready to leave home and take on the world. 18 is a significant age — in a lot of places, you’re probably registering to vote for the first time, graduating high school, applying to universities or jobs, maybe you’re in a serious relationship and navigating where that goes after high school. It’s kind of expected that there will be a shift after this year, and that can bring a lot of anxiety, but also a lot of peace. I also wrote this down because as much as I remember being 18, I am not the same person. This is a beautiful thing. You get to meet many new versions of yourself as you grow older. Life changes, and so do you, and you have the opportunity to grow into whatever person you need to be in that stage of your life. I feel like I can look back at myself even a year ago and I don’t resonate with her. I know it was me, and at my core we are the same, but the ways in which I address friendship, romance, conflict, change — those are all different. Interestingly enough, I also know in a year or two or three, I’ll probably feel the same way about my 21-year-old self. I love this aspect of growing older. I trust myself to evolve as necessary to facilitate a good life for myself. Trust yourself at 18 to make the decisions you feel are right at this time to prosper.

This point connects with the last, but it focuses more on the people you surround yourself with. ‘You will meet a lot of changing people. Some of them will only be put in your life for a certain amount of time at the exact time they need to be there, and as you both change you might drift apart. That doesn’t mean the friendship wasn’t important, it just means that it served its time in your life.’ This is a piece of advice I would give anyone regardless of age. I think I grew up with the mindset that if I had a best friend or a close friend, we would stay as that for the rest of our lives. And on some level, that is true. I do have friends that have been in my life for many years, but we are also not the same people we were when we established our friendship. I have many friendships that ended or drifted apart because if you’re unable to connect with a person as they change, you might not serve a place in their life any longer (and vice versa). This isn’t a bad thing, and while it can be really difficult to stomach, I also want you to remember that these are still deeply significant people in your life. I will always have love for my ex-best friend from high school, but I also know that we aren’t the same people we were and we wouldn’t provide for each other as friends now. That friendship was really important to me at that time in my life, and it taught me a lot about what I need out of a friendship. Her role in my life for that period was so necessary and I feel very grateful I had the chance to experience that kind of relationship. I’ve felt this several more times as I’ve gotten to university, and while it is sad to accept, there are many people who were only meant to be in my life for a certain time period. I said in the last paragraph that you will meet many new versions of you as you grow older; everyone else does, too. Sometimes you get to meet these versions of your friends, and they are still valuable in your life. I’ve had the privilege of experiencing this, too, and I find it lovely that our 18-year-old selves bonded and transitioned to our now (almost) 21-year-old selves, who are still bonded but in a different way. I think that university also expedites that, because there are many people who will tell you that the friends you made the first semester of college are not the friends you keep throughout and after college. This may or may not be true (or may be partially true), and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have been friends, it just means you were there for each other at the beginning and then you let one another have room to develop in whatever way was need. I think it’s important to stress that you shouldn’t feel bad or blame yourself if you lose friendships as you develop. Of course you can mourn these friendships, especially if you realize later they weren’t as healthy or favorable as they should have been, but also think of them as a learning experience. You had the opportunity to learn what you value in a friendship and what drains you, and you can take that with you as you develop new friendships (and maintain old ones).

Shifting a little bit, I wanted to touch on dating, because it’s really freaking annoying at these years. ‘Dating in high school is significant, but dating in college feels a lot different. Those don’t negate each other.’ Now of course there’s always that high school sweetheart couple who stays together through life changes and maturity and manages to uphold their commitment. I find these people incredible, and I think these relationships are beautiful. Part of committing to someone is understanding that they will not be the same person they were when you met, and having enough respect for them to love them through growth. This happens for a few people in high school, but in my experience, high school dating feels much different than university dating. My relationships in high school, again, served a purpose for that time in my life, opening me up to a new form of connection. They allowed me to begin to understand what it meant to care about someone enough to make time in your life for them, sharing highs and lows. My old relationships were the beginning of this, and I find them much different than the relationships I’ve developed while dating after I moved to Prague. When I was 16, I had my heart broken for the first time (as many of us do). This was the first time I had trusted another person with my heart, and although we were still under our parents’ roofs, we able to begin to understand attentiveness and fidelity. I see them as the benchmark to what I now expect from relationships. It’s hard to know when you’ll meet someone you want to spend years (or even the rest of your life) with. Some of my dating has been casual, meant more for companionship than devotion. Other relationships have been one-sided, with one of us wanting more from the connection than the other. I’ve had friends who found their current significant other at 18 when they first got to university, and I’ve had friends who have only been dating for fun for 3 years, and I’ve had friends who have been holding their dates to a high standard, looking for someone specifically to grow with. All of these things are valid, and there’s no way to predict which of them you’ll be. Especially as you enter your adult life, you will meet a lot of people who are learning about their sexuality, relationship types, commitment style, and future expectations. You’ll probably be disappointed more than once, and you might get your heart broken. There is no timeline for when you’re supposed to be in a relationship, or engaged, or married, or have kids (if that’s what you choose). At 18, this is hard to accept, but try to relish in the knowledge that you now have control over these decisions, and take the time to explore what you want out of a partner (or if you want one).

This one’s pretty personal to me: ‘The whole world opens up once you leave your shitty high school.’ I think I’ve expressed my dislike for my high school to nearly everyone who asks me about where I’m from. It was a rural, conservative, unwelcoming place (to anyone outside of the heteronormative white population), and I do not miss it at all. I think this is part of the reason I feel that I changed so much after 18. You get to explode into this new, free version of yourself once you graduate. Maybe you’re going to university or working locally still, but you’re no longer in the controlled (and forced) environment that is high school. This is also why I think so many people get to university and start to question or explore their sexuality. I sometimes explain to other people that when I was in high school, I was very cookie-cutter. I tried to be as generic as possible, straightening and highlighting my curly hair and wearing trendy clothes (once I got a job) and dating football players. I know that part of this was to protect myself from the judgement of my peers, but by the time I graduated, I only felt like I had molded myself to fit what I thought other people expected of me. When I got out of that situation and no longer felt like I was in the eyes of my 13-year peers, I had to unlearn so many defense mechanisms. I got to explore with my style, makeup, hair, and even personality. Connecting to my first point, at 18 I was just learning who I was outside of high school and figuring out who I could be and not who I should be, which is why some of the friendships I made at that point (and some of my remaining high school friendships) could not be maintained. I don’t want you to let people hold you back, as much as you might feel selfish for that. Be selfish. You shouldn’t feel like you have to remain friends with someone if they’re an energy vampire or if they’re constantly reminding you of a version of yourself that isn’t someone you are now. Go explore who you can be outside of what you have been since you were 5 years old, and only keep the people who respect this in your life. You are literally a butterfly right now, and I’m telling you to fly.

‘As the world expects more from you, you should expect more from it.’ As someone with insane climate anxiety who worries constantly about the political and economic state of the world, I decided to include this because your responsibilities are about to get much, much larger. Yes, this is scary. But trust me when I say, you are capable of handling this. Your biggest resource is yourself, and as long as you put trust into your abilities, you will be able to take on all of the things that life (and older people) like to throw at young adults. There are so many things expected of you right now, and I want you to put on some noise-cancelling headphones and think of what you expect of yourself right now. There is no correct timeline, that’s bullshit. Nobody in your age group is figuring everything out right now, and none of you are going to do the exact same things at the same time. Yes, you need to be aware of bills and eating and taking care of yourself, but outside of the absolutely 100% necessary things, you should not let the world tell you what it wants from you. You need to be telling the world what you want from it. Go register to vote, learn about global and local issues, read books, learn history, talk to people (!!!), learn about the world and figure out how you want to see it change. This might sound redundant, but we are literally the generation of change. It’s scary knowing that, but it’s also empowering. You have the resources to educate yourself and construct a world which is built on respect for each other, for our environment and animals, for yourself. Honor your feelings of anxiety, and talk about those with people. Build a community so that you don’t feel alone, and I promise you that you’ll realize how many other people resonate with this. It’s not fair that when you turn 18 you’re bombarded with a million different expectations; turn that around and start to expect things from the world, because it doesn’t get to tell you how to live your life.

‘It’s okay to change your mind! Change your major if that’s what your heart and gut are telling you to do. More people do it than you realize.’ Did you expect me not to put this? This is like my mantra right now. You’re 18, you’ve been in a prison of hormonal, angry, confused teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing and are feeling pressured from their parents, teachers, friends, and the world, and now you’re not sure if that career you wanted at 16 is the same you want now? That’s okay! I personally give you permission to say ‘fuck it’ and change your mind. We literally live on a floating rock. You’ve started the first semester or year of your university program and you hate it? Talk to the adults in your life, talk to people in that field, talk to your advisors and friends. Figure out if there’s a new direction you can go with it, or if you’re not passionate about it at all anymore, pick a different major. Or if you need to, take time off. Maybe you aren’t meant to go to university, or maybe you need time outside of high school and university to reset your expectations of what you want out of the next few years. Notice I don’t say out of life, which is something I myself had to unlearn. The decisions you make at 18 are significant, but they don’t control the outcome of your life. I remember when I posted my ‘It’s Okay To Change Your Mind’ article a few weeks ago, this random guy sent me a DM saying that it was really hard to do that when you’re already in a career. Okay, and? It’s hard to change your mind at any point. I don’t think my experience with this has been easy at all, and I won’t lie to you and tell you that life changes and big decisions are easy. I trust your judgement and you have the resources to make the best decisions with the information you have at a time. Once you’re presented with new information, if those decisions don’t resonate with you any longer, it’s okay to change your mind. If you look around and start to talk to people, even strangers will tell you of all the times they thought they wanted something and made a different decision that ended up being even better than they could imagine. This is where I think we need more authenticity in the world and on the internet. If more people shared their experiences with wanting something, realizing it wasn’t what they expected, and making a decision to facilitate change, I think 18-year-olds would feel less pressured to outline the next 50 years of their life fresh out of high school.

This brings me to my last point. ‘If you set a timeline for your life, the universe will laugh at you. You can have a frame of guidance, but you’ll never be able to predict some of the decisions you’ll make.’ This is personally targeted toward 18-year-old me, who wrote down what she would do for the rest of her life for every major she considered. Who expected to have everything figured out when she decided to move abroad, and who promptly was humbled. This is kind of a typical approach, but none of us expected a pandemic to happen a few years ago (aside from some very smart scientists), and I think I can speak for most of us when I say that this changed the trajectory of our lives. I genuinely don’t know if I would be abroad if I hadn’t been so isolated and seen how hateful some people were during the pandemic. I had always wanted to go abroad, and I had looked at universities, but I think that applying to universities during the pandemic was the catalyst I needed to make this happen. I use this example because at 15, pre-Covid, my plan was probably very different due to the overarching idea that I couldn’t anticipate something as big as a pandemic. I think it’s valuable to have an idea of what you want, even to set expectations for what you want, but I don’t think you can plan when those expectations will come true. Right now, I know that I would like to stay in Europe long-term, but I also know that I might go back to America to start my career depending on the circumstances. I know that I want to get married and have kids, but I also don’t know when I’ll meet my future partner, when or if I’ll be able to have kids, or even what country I’ll be in when that happens. I know I want to adopt a cat and maybe a dog once I graduate and I’m working, but I don’t know how long it will be before I’m settled into a new apartment and job and feel comfortable enough to make that commitment. I have set these goals, these expectations out of life, and I am framing my more important decisions towards these things, but I cannot and will not try to plan out the next 5, 10, 15-years of my life to see these happen. At 18, the world feels imposing, so try to take some of the pressure off and make decisions based off of the things you think you’ll want, but don’t resent the world if she has a different plan for you.

February is usually the month in which I start to reflect a lot. It also tends to be the month I experience a depressive episode, or generally don’t feel great about the world. Right before I turn a new age, I tend to wonder if I’m making the right decisions for myself, and I start to compare where I’m at to where other people are or were at my are. Three years ago, I committed to university in Prague in February. Two years ago, I was on a gap semester, helping my parents move out of my childhood home across the state. Last year, I was starting my first semester at a new university. Right now, I just got confirmation that I’m able to walk at my graduation in 4 months and I’m writing the blog I’ve been dreaming about for years. Never ever would 18-year-old me be able to expect these events, but I also think she’d be proud of who I am and where I am now. As my 20th year comes to a close, I want to tell 18-year-old me and all of the 18-year-olds out there that I’m so excited for you. You have the privilege to make what you want out of life, and I can’t wait to see where that takes you. Enjoy it — I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.