Growing up, we spin these fantasies of getting older, envisioning the women well become. We plan out every aspect of our lives as if they were electives, picturing the perfect wedding dress, the outdoor venue lined with string lights, our CEO versions of ourselves, and let’s be real, which Disney prince we’d spend our lives with. The life where everything comes together as easily as our Pinterest boards. The fascination and pure bliss of this imagined world become its own kind of obsession.
In reality, we sit in our beds without minds in the cloud, drawing out our lives and flawed hearts around the names of boys who would become distant memories. I can speak for many when I say that these lives we imagined would simply unfold unquestioned, without fear or consequence. At the ripe age of eight years old, 20 seemed so far away, and yet it was something that I could never erase from my mind. Hearing our life plans and desires, our parents urge us to slow down, appreciate the innocence and purity we have now, “being an adult is hard,” they say over and over again. The more it is said, the more enticed we get, eager to push through and grow up so fast.
Well, here we are now, 20, I am a full-blown adult. I have bills, my own apartment, rent bills, and more bills. I have responsibilities I couldn’t have even imagined at eight years old. And honestly, I have no clue what we were thinking. Needless to say, the timelines we crafted with our glitter and glue are not at all reflected in our realities today.
And yet the one thing that we got right, that has never changed, is how often I find myself obsessed over the future.
Somewhere in the cashouts of late-night study sessions, last night’s debriefs, and the consuming void of LinkedIn, trying to piece together our life experiences, so employers know we have our lives together. We find these spaces where we can recognize that maturing is more than crossing things off our 12-year-old lists, but rather it is about discovering how to live in the moments we had never written.
I think this is what 20 is really about. The beauty in the unknown and the realities of not having everything figured out, but simply falling in love with the version of yourself that is living in the present, the world outside of the one we thought we were creating. The woman who is trying to make sense of the world, juggling friendships, relationships and the glaring pressures of university and the uncertainty of what comes next.
So, to my 20-somethings, where the pressure is on learning to love and live through it, although we may not be in our castles with Prince Eric, the lives we have built and the relationships we do have are beyond the limits of our imagination.