Thoughts on 20
Part of me wonders if the legal age of adulthood should be twenty, because there’s something about the end of your teenage years that feels so much more momentous. I was so excited to turn eighteen, and I remember the night before my 18th birthday I almost considered it my last night of childhood. Eighteen was monumental — I voted for the first time, I graduated high school, I got a piercing by myself … oh, and I moved across an ocean on my own. But through all of that, I was still a teenager, and others thought of me as one. I think I was mature at eighteen, and I am proud of who I was when I became an adult, but I didn’t truly feel “grown up” until I hit twenty.
Don’t get me wrong — I know I’m not old. In fact, I’m still a baby adult. I just have now exited my teenage years and ventured into my twenties, a decade which will involve finding myself, finding love (both among friends and partners), starting my career, moving to new places, and maybe even starting a family (heavy on the maybe). Twenty feels a bit unstable because you lose a lot of control. Your frontal lobe is finishing development over the first half of the decade, and you’re most likely living completely independent of your family for the first time. I heard the sentiment once that your teenage years are for growing up, finishing childhood, and learning about your personality and independence, while your twenties are about actually finding yourself. To some people, this may mean grad school, or getting married, or beginning their career. To others, this may mean buying a house, or having a child, or starting a business. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do your twenties because everyone wants different things out of the decade. I have friends in long-term relationships and I have friends who would rather do anything than date right now. I guess what I’m trying to say is turning twenty feels so significant because you open a door to the rest of your life.
It’s completely valid to feel anxious about entering a new chapter of your life. I have several friends in their mid-to-late twenties who have given me great advice about their experiences throughout the decade, and I really love hearing their perspective. I also find community in people the same age as me who are encountering similar growing pains to myself. Two thoughts on this — 1. It is so nice to have others validate your worries about adulthood; 2. If we all feel this way, that means it’s completely normal. I find that one of my biggest contributors to adulthood anxiety is comparison; feeling like everyone else has their life together and I’m behind. In case you resonate with this, I’m here as your expert anxious twenty-year-old to tell you that all of my fellow anxious twenty-year-old friends feel the exact same way and even if they seem like they have their life together, they’re most likely putting on a front because they also feel like everyone else is doing better than them. It’s truly a vicious cycle because oftentimes we don’t want to admit to others that we’re just as lost as the next person.
I recently had a really great conversation about this with two of my closest friends. I was projecting my own anxieties about not having post-grad figured out yet, and I was frustrated at them because I knew that one of them was most likely going to grad school and the other was probably going to get a job offer from her internship after graduation. After having expressed my feelings, they both told me that although they had ideas for post-grad, neither of them were sure of their decisions and they were about as far into planning their future as I was. It was easy to presume I was behind because I couldn’t picture someone fretting as much as I do, but also understanding the irrationality of anxiety, I know that my personal distress makes everything else fade into the background. Sticking to the concept of sonder (of course), I want to emphasize that within this conversation, I was focusing on my own fears and neglecting to put myself in their shoes. If you simplify it, every twenty-something-year-old is going through the same transition period into adulthood. We all process this differently and we’re all going at a different pace as we navigate our lives, but empathizing with one another enables a sense of belongingness that most of us crave. We live in unstable times — politically, monetarily, and environmentally — and encouraging connection can reduce the common fallacy that we need to have everything figured out.
In case you’d like to hear another perspective on this topic, my friend recommended this podcast:
