Being in your 20s as a young woman often feels like harboring emotions of happiness, grief, love, lust, anxiety, tiredness, etc. I have been around the sun for 22 years, but there were a plethora of lessons that needed to be learned. Entering my 20s never scared me, but being in my 20s caused me to overthink every emotion I felt in a short time.
Here is my small guide to the emotions that I have learned and faced in my 20s:
GRIEF
It is weird to grieve, we know that we will lose people we love, whether it is due to growing apart or death. However, often it becomes a last resort for us to want to think about.
Grief is weird in your adult years; it is not the same as being a kid and being able to take days off and grieve properly. There is no stopping in your adulthood, the world keeps spinning even if yours is collapsing. What no one tells anyone about grief is that you’ll be fine on a rainy Thursday, but on a sunny Sunday, when things are still and there is no reason to cry, grief comes creeping and you have no choice but to feel those emotions.
What I learned from my time with grief is that grief is not there to be your enemy. It is there as a reminder of the love and all emotions you have for another person. Do not run away from grief. Let yourself grieve and process the loss that was faced.
happiness
Happiness is not promised. This can be a tricky emotion because everyone thinks that being happy should just easily be a default. We often forget how much happiness is in our day-to-day life.
If we explore ourselves more and find new hobbies such as running, cooking, painting, etc., we find small pockets of happiness. But even daily, there are ways to find happiness.
There are songs, artists, food, colors, and people that make our day. When I look for those small beautiful things on a daily basis I am able to have that small happiness even if does not last the whole day. It should be a goal daily to look for the small things that help make us smile.
LOVE > LUST
In this generation, it is tough to separate the lust there is from the love you think you feel. Not to sound like a broken clock, but this generation’s hookup culture has many young women and men who mistake lust for love.
Never settle for hookup culture if what you are longing for is a romantic relationship. The “situationship” is NOT going to be a relationship and you should not have to think that the only way for love to happen is if lust happens first.
Many people are out there looking for what you are looking for as well. There is so much more than just the college town and college guys you see at the bar. Not that there isn’t a chance you luck out and find a good one, but it’s important to remember your options aren’t as limited as you may think. There is so much life to be explored and many people you will cross who might be just what you are looking for. You will not have to settle for the lust limerance because there is real love out there!
Anxiety for the future
No one knows what they are doing! There isn’t only one way to live life. As finishing college inches closer and closer, it becomes very prominent for anxiety to creep into everyone’s mind and heart.
It is normal to be delayed a semester, jobless out of college, wanting a change in career choices, stressed, or just simply stuck. You are not meant to have it figured out. You haven’t even made it halfway through your 20s!
I think that there are some days where I know everything I want to do and be, and others I simply question if this is exactly what I want to do at all. A few things that I have started doing to ease this anxiety are:
- Pivot: Change the routine, apply for a different internship, and start over. I am always okay to change my course if it isn’t aligned with what I feel is right.
- Being with my friends: Having real honest conversations about our lives has always kept all of us closer but made the future feel less stressful.
- Night out: I know that may sound avoidant. However, I find it to be more calming. Whenever I am in a random town with my friends at 2 a.m., it has always made me realize that there is so much more to life than stressing about what I can not control or do not know.
twenty-somethings…
*sighs* Being in your twenties will have you feeling as if you are running out of time. It is intense to learn about yourself and others while also trying to be a good sister, friend, daughter, partner, and human. However, it is all a learning curve and we are not meant to figure it out overnight. We are meant to acknowledge it and grow.
As always a great quote from Timothée Chalamet himself that I have taken with me in my twenties is,“You can be the master of your fate and you can be the captain of your soul but you have to realize that life is coming from you and not at you. And that takes time.”