Feeling 22
22:00
It's impossible to not
hit your 22nd birthday and not have Taylor Swift singing "oh-oh,
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling 22" in your head. She may have
produced a catchy club song, but she kinda had a point with her lyrics. Okay, maybe not all of them,
but I can't help but feel that she captured the essence of confusion that makes itself more maddeningly present as you slowly inch your way up the double digits in the ladder of life. Whoever said that the twenties are the best years of your life, lied.
It is genuinely such a confusing period of life. It's also bloody hard. The disorienting sensation of no longer being on the
brink of adulthood, but being slam-dunked head first into adulthood is dizzying, terrifying, and not even remotely exciting. The burdening
weight of adulthood has, more often than not, made me want to curl up in bed, draw the curtains, and not leave the house for a decade. THE PRESSURE OF BEING AN ADULT PEOPLE.
 |
| Source |
Where's the thrill of the twenties promised in movies, books and music? The romanticised illusion that the twenties are the most fun, exciting, prime years of life shattered into splintered pieces long ago but there's still a hopeful (foolish?) voice inside my head that whispers it's still early days. Yeah...it's been two years and nada. It needs to shut up already. I miss the days when I thought that the "early twenties" were the height of life, the tip of the iceberg, the top of the mountain as it were. The misconception that it's when life truly begins - when careers fall into place and when Prince Charming comes to your door on his noble steed - was a fanciful dream that I bought into when I was a mere sixteen. Now, the crushing disappointment of being a twenty-something year old makes me want to scream from the roof tops, maybe coupled with a rant embellished with profanities and my own tragic life experiences to boot.
 |
| Source |
You will watch your friends start different chapters in their lives, and suddenly you're no longer on the same page, and it's like "wait, hold up, I still need to do this and this and this" but they're slowly stitching together their blanket of life while yours is threadbare, fraying at the edges while the seam comes undone with the meticulously woven threads unraveling faster than sand slipping through your fingers. And it feels like you're running out of time while you desperately grapple with loose ends as you try to catch up but the seconds bleed into minutes which bleed into hours which bleed into days, weeks, months, and before you know it you've slammed straight into a brick wall that is the realisation that you are nowhere near where you're supposed to be, or where you thought you'd be. It's messy and confusing, and you try to tell yourself that every human being lives life at their own pace, that we're each living in different time zones and that's okay, but that doesn't stop your heart from plummeting to six feet under the ground when your mind wanders to just how much time is escaping you. The twenties is a haunted house that feeds on the fear of lost time and is filled with the trinkets of empty promises, crushed dreams and failures that are stacked up like old books on a broken bookshelf.
Oh man, if you're a teenager please just bloody enjoy it. You have no idea what is going to hit you. You're borderline adult so you can get drunk off the feeling of being "grown up", but you're also still in your teens with the stupid (yet admirably brave) idea that the world is yours for the taking, and the naive dream of a perfect future that lies ahead. What I would give to have that again. The second you cross over into your twenties, you're suddenly laden with the burdens of the adult world. Suddenly your life is waking up at 6am for that crappy job you hate, getting mail which is bills, bills and more bills, and oh look, a statement informing you that your wages will be docked each month to pay off your student debt. Your struggles are no longer remembering mum to sign your school planner for Monday morning, or getting into trouble for not wearing school uniform. No, now it's taxes and playing with the very real idea of moving out and the novel concept of saving money. Because whilst you splashed out your student loan on designer handbags and three McDonalds a week, you'll suddenly find yourself relying on your own (minimum wage) income to fund adult luxuries like daily train tickets, car insurance, and in my case, equipment for my lifelong career (buying an ophthalmoscope and retinoscope is suddenly high on my priority list) which goes into the thousands.
* public speaking
* not being afraid of teenagers
* calling the doctor yourself
* taxes
* arguing without crying
* having a normal sleep pattern
* having an answer to the question:
"what do you want to do with your life?"
Do I feel 22? Hell to the yeah. Just not in the drunk, crazy, overly cheery way that Taylor felt it. I do feel lost and confused and miserable. I feel like I am so behind on life (I have missed more stops on the Train of Life than I can count). I gravitate towards chick lit when browsing a bookshelf more times than I care to admit, my guilty pleasure TV show is The Jeremy Kyle Show, and I cannot function without a nap. I am a teenage soul in a twenty year old body, stumbling blindly through the pitch black room that is my life, trying to find the light switch so I can find my way, and meanwhile scrolling through Tumblr, laughing at the scarily accurate quotes of adulthood that make me simultaneously want to go cry in a corner at how this is now my life, but also breathe out a heavy sigh of relief because hey, I'm clearly not the only person who feels like this twenty jazz (or adult jazz in general) just ain't for me.
| A collection of Tumblr's finest quotes that sum up adulthood p e r f e c t l y
AFTER MUCH RESEARCH, CONSIDERATION, AND EXPERIMENTATION, I HAVE DECIDED THAT ADULTHOOD IS NOT FOR ME. THANK YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY
0 comments