I turned twenty, two months ago, but it felt like I had already turned twenty long before that. However, about two hours before the clock struck twelve, and I officially became a twenty-something, It hit me. Like a truck. I was no longer a teenager, I was essentially now an adult. A young adult, of course, but still an adult. It felt different from the time I turned 18, now it felt real.
I have been through different phases of the customary existential crisis that every ‘young adult’ faces in these past two years since I turned 18 ( I actually go through one at least every other week, It’s crippling, and not fun at all), and shortly before my twentieth, I went through quite a draining one. I was confronted with the sharp reality that I was my teenage years were over, and I was overcome with an indescribable feeling of loss. Loss of a time, a period that I would never be able to get back, loss of the now farther distance of childhood, and innocence where everything was easier, most of all, a loss of everything I never did as a teenager, and will now never get to do.
See I never got that fun, and wild teenage dream Pinterest-esque experience. Never got to go on crazy night drives with friends that I think will always be there, never got to do any dumb teenager activity. I never got to have my own Iconic ” We are infinite moment” with my arms outspread at the back of a truck, as my friend drives through a tunnel into the city, I never got to really experience what it is like to be a teenager, and quite frankly, It left me feeling quite robbed. I always wanted to have my teenage “We are infinite” moment, but I never got to, and that was one of the depths where my sense of loss emerged from.
My teen years, most especially the later years were marked by me just being stuck with a feeling of limbo, waiting to do something, waiting for something. I moved to a whole new country when I was 17, and while that was pretty awesome, my elation was cut short pretty randomly, by circumstances beyond my control. No, I did not get pregnant or anything like that, for those wondering, but I was left with a period that put me in a perpetually dark phase that was so long, and intense that it defined the latter years of my teenagehood. So on that day, I turned twenty, I was left with a sense of loss of what I didn’t do, with a yearning for what I could have done.
Then In my saddened haze, and moping, I was suddenly transported forty to fifty years in the future, and I was confronted with the reality that if I felt this way now at just twenty, how devasted will I be if, at sixty, I look back at my life, and I am filled with immense pain at all the experiences I didn’t get to have, all the “yes'” I never said, all the moment’s I never got to live, the feelings I never got to feel. I looked forward even to ten years from now when I hit the big 30, a fully grown adult at that point, and in that instant, I decided that I was done with the excuses. No matter what the circumstance was, I wasn’t going to spend my twenties the way I spent my teens. I wasn’t going to spend it waiting anymore. I am going to live it, to the fullest, with fervor. For three reasons;
- I only get to be a certain age once: Just like my teen years are gone for good, soon, my twenties will be gone for good also.
- I only get to be young once: There is a general idea that you are officially old when you hit thirty. While I don’t exactly subscribe to this idea (age is a thing of the mind), I do think there is a certain truth to it. At thirty, people are generally more toned down, and less likely to do crazy young people things, and when they do, it is usually disapproved and described as “She’s a little too old for that”. Well I want to do all the young people stuff now so that when I’m older, I can proudly say ” I’ve seen it all”
- I want to start Living: I don’t want to waste any more time of my life, just waiting for when the good things are gonna happen, I want to start living now, and I want to enjoy my twenties in all of its glory. So that’s what I’m gonna do