For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be an adult. Like so badly. Since I was 9 I’ve been thinking about being 20. I let a lot of my middle school and high school time fly by because I was so consumed with the idea of being in college and making all these girlfriends and hanging out with dudes: it was just something that I’ve always dreamt of.Â
Now that I’m 21, the age I’ve always wanted to be, I see things totally different. Of course I love the freedom and the excitement that comes with being in my twenties, but there’s so many different things that I had never thought of, like how you’re pretty much always going to be in middle school for the rest of your life.Â
People are so weird. So weird. It’s like the social pressure and the confusion of being in middle school that you thought would go away, kind of just manifests the same way, now I’m just older. Wanting to fit in, trying to find a group of people that suit you, navigating relationships, it’s all too familiar to a sixth grader and a fifteenth grader. There are so many people I’ve met that are just clones of people that I knew when I was 12.Â
It’s so hard to navigate friendships when people are just as lost as you and you can’t blame them because they’re just trying to figure themselves out. It’s frustrating, especially as a woman, because we have so many complexities to how we navigate the world. There’s things that we worry about when we’re 12, like getting our period, that you will always worry about until you’re going through menopause. It’s like things don’t necessarily change, they just are a little bit different.Â
As a woman within this time of social media,it’s so hard to form these connections with other women because a lot of girls think that an Instagram comment once a month is a sufficient amount of communication. I am sure others experience this whole spiral of, who am I? Am I real? What am I going to do after college? What am I doing in college? Still, it’s hard to come to peace with this because you feel very vulnerable and weird. There’s something about these two phases of my life that are so similar because I just feel so off.Â
The awkwardness of being a tween and the awkwardness of finding who you are in college are a little bit too similar for me and I’m not into it, however if I can survive middle school I can literally survive anything.