punches & rolling with them

12/12/23

why does nobody talk about how much your 20s suck?

just kidding, that’s all anyone ever says about your 20s. for whatever reason, i thought mine would be different. when i first heard 22 by taylor swift in 2013, i was ten going on eleven years old. at that time, it was just a fun song to sing on the radio in the backseat of whoever’s car. but at 21, freshly moved out and experiencing the ups and downs of life, i’ve never understood more why she sung “we’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time [...] it’s miserable and magical” to a silly backtrack as if the night was hers.

in a way, it was. when you’re in your early twenties, especially if you’ve moved out from your parent’s house, life feels almost too in the palm of your hand. it feels like freedom, like no curfews and no being told to clean your room or wash the dishes and when. it feels like you’re a real, true, autonomous adult, and you can do whatever you want, with no one to stop you or tell you any better.

of course, you are a real true autonomous adult that can do whatever they want with nobody to stop you or tell you any better. sometimes you wish that there was–a more experienced adult, somebody who actually knows what they’re doing and can help you make the decisions that mold your future. and yes, some of us can call somebody older than us, and they can help us make informed decisions that do help mold our future, but at the end of the day, it’s in the palm of our hands, not theirs.

growing up, my parents always seemed stress and overwhelmed about something. as a kid, you sense this, and shrink yourself so as to make yourself smaller, invisible, not another problem. and while yes, we were their responsibilities, becoming an adult has made me realize that, well, if it ain’t one thing it’s another. a lot of us heard this growing up, but i feel like it’s one of those things that we really don’t get until we get it. the struggle of adulthood is normalized, bestowed upon young adults like a crown or rite of passage. “welcome to adulthood,” they say on the phone, miles away physically and emotionally, “we tried to tell you.”

but why does no one try to tell us how to make it? they tell us that it’ll be hard, that they’re trying to teach us, help us, that we’re not ready for the world out there. they tell us that we’ll be broke and we’ll struggle and that that struggle is part of adulthood. why does no one tell us that how lost we feel is how lost everyone feels, and that we have the capabilities to get through it because we’re strong, not because we have no choice?

i always knew that if it wasn’t one thing it was another. got it. there’s always gonna be some shit going on, and life doesn’t stop for you. what i didn’t know was that all of those things? they’re going on at the same time. yeah, your partner dumps you at the same time that your car breaks down and you’re short on rent for the month. oh yeah, your best friend’s birthday is next week too, and they want to airbnb the penthouse that they filmed gossip girl in in new york city, and by the way, you have $7.61 to your name. it all happens at the same time! why does nobody warn you about this?! (today, as my friend was telling me about how it felt to them like nothing in their life was going right, the already-open pack of ramen noodles they had taken out to cook spilled on them, and they found out shortly after that the seasoning packet was missing.) on top of the million other things that it seems like i wasn’t prepared for, i wasn’t prepared for that, and it seems like amongst the generation before me, the general consensus is to “just roll with the punches”.

oh my god, fuck that!

i never signed up for this. i never signed up for anything at all...

there’s so much going on these days between school and work (or lack thereof, in my current case) and visiting family for holidays and making money and spending money and not having it and trying to balance your intrapersonal relationships (i’m sorry if i haven’t answered your text message–i’m trying hard to survive). how does anybody make time for anything? i feel like i wake up in the mornings and it takes forty dollars out of my bank account. i turn over in bed twice and three holidays have passed. i blinked twice this year and it was december, the month of my birthday. where had i been?

time passes differently in your adulthood. so often when the sun shines into my room the right way, i find myself mourning the summer days during my childhood that i took for granted. i stayed in the house and watched disney channel’s sizzlin’ summer, longing to have the kind of personality that forced a child to play outside. i miss when all my cousins and i were in one place, shuttled together by car by our families, instead of having to schedule time for each other. i could go back to the past, but nobody’s there. i’ve found myself asking the same question over the past few months: how does anyone keep up with the speed of life? in my mind, i’m still seven years old, playing on my nintendo ds at a spiderman table in the house where my room was decorated with disney princess wall decals. when did things get so complicated? and though i’d never tell them, the “don’t be in a rush to grow up” crowd that had preached to my child self had tea, but i don’t know if it would be better or worse if they had detailed the perils of being an adult that laid ahead.

money, love, heartbreak, careers, growth, relationships, life and the like. every day i feel like i missed a lesson on how to be an adult, and a good one. i look to the elders around me, but the older i get, the more i see that nobody around me is perfect, and that we’re all humans just trying to figure it out and doing our best. i’m doing my best, but the events that life throw at me continuously yield the question: is my best good enough? are the circumstances that i find myself in a product of my own doing, or is this life at its finest: difficult unless you roll with the punches? i feel like every choice i make has greater implications, and moving with intention with everything you do proves difficult when you find yourself catching and ducking life’s curveballs anyway. is there really anything that i can do? with the way that mine have been going, i want to assume that your twenties aren’t meant to be survived, but would i be here otherwise?

i think that by nature, your 20s are supposed to suck. it’s the first time you’re experiencing real life on your own, with only the tools that being raised by your environment specifically gave you, whether those tools are good or bad. they’re supposed to suck because it’s when you start figuring everything out, trial and error. i’m 21, so a one-year-old adult. i know nothing. i know less than nothing. you thought you knew who you were before? let me tell you, you have no clue. and let me also tell you, i think that to absolutely lose your mind while you’re figuring it out is the real rite of passage. completely unironically–maybe the rite of passage was the friends that we made along the way. maybe i don’t even know what i’m talking about, and i’m just trying to make sense out of the madness that i’ve been permanently thrust into, and madness it has been. this week has been so shitty, i forgot to call my mom.

two nights ago, i started reading the book (yes, the book) called “my year of rest and relaxation”. the whole book is about the protagonist trying to sleep as much as possible for an entire year, and her life would somehow fix itself after that. i’ve heard good and bad things about the book, but unfortunately, it resonated with me from the second i started reading it. this past week i’ve slept at least 14 hours every day, with my waking hours only being me trying to get myself as tired as possible so i could–you guessed it–go to sleep, because sleeping through your problems is easier than dealing with them. reading the book stunned me a little, especially because of how relatable it is to my life at the time. there’s a tumblr post i found years ago about how the universe drops media in your life right at the time where you resonate with it the most, and it’s stuck with me. i saw myself in the unnamed and (assumed to be) white narrator, so you can make of that what you will. so maybe that’s my 21st year so far: my year of rest and relaxation--depressive episode, substance abuse and all.

or maybe the mistake that we make is trying to fit our 20s in a neat little box to try to make sense of it. maybe my 20s isn’t my year of rest and relaxation at all–maybe it’s my years of messiness and fun and trial and error and friendships and hardships and love and loss and family drama, just like everybody else’s. maybe i’m not special in my struggle–i’m just like everybody else, going through their messy ass twenties too, and something about that fact and the idea that everything i’ve ever experienced and will experience has been experienced before, and that i am just another person going through the human experience. or maybe all of that fun little philosophy is just my own personal neat little box.

you know when you’re at the mall or any public space and there’s just a child screaming their head off? that’s how i feel, all the time. i’ve brought it up to so many different people so many times that it should be socially acceptable for adults to do the same thing. i feel like i have just as much to scream about if not more than a toddler. shit, i’m doing all of this for the first time too! i feel just like you! by the amount of people that have agreed with me, i wonder if this is how all adults feel. maybe everybody over the age of 20 just wants to scream. i know i do.