A Few Lessons from My Twenties
So I’m in my mid-thirties (as of this writing) and as I began my thirties, I realized that there were so many lessons from my twenties that have shaped the life that I have now.
1. Good relationships with other people make me better. One thing that my twenties shifted my perspective on is developing my relationships with others as a priority. I've developed some great friendships in my twenties, with people who make me better and make me want to be better: more patient, more loving, more understanding. In my friendships now I'm always thinking about how can I make the lives of people I care about better: how can I really listen, how I can be there, how can I offer support from wherever I am? I'm not saying to throw people away if they don't make you better, because I don't believe that people are disposable, just that my relationships with all the people in my life shifted when I considered them from an angle of mutual development. There is nothing like the ongoing support of friends who have seen you at your absolute worst, and your absolute best, and love you and remind you that you are awesome and worthy and make you just want to be better. There's a quote that says "a friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to your when you've forgotten the words." I have absolutely experienced this, not just because I've forgotten my song, but also because I've given my friends the space to be there for me to sing it to me.
2. Being okay with where I am even when I'm not where I want to be. This one has been tough to learn, especially in my later twenties when I felt like I hadn't progressed far enough in my career, I wasn't making enough money and/or I still wasn't in a long-term career path. I felt like I couldn't be happy with where I was in life because I knew that it wasn't where I wanted to be. I really had to sit myself down and take stock of the benefits of where I at the time, the connections I was making, the things I was learning, my ongoing development as a professional scientist and realize that where I was then was very good for me, and that recognizing this doesn't mean that I don't want to move on to something else.
3. It's always the wrong time; it's always the right time. We're stuck in a "timing is everything" culture that says that everything happens at the right time, or you have to be in the right place at the right time, or some other variation of this. Well, I'm here to tell you on today, there's no right time. Do the thing, start the thing, quit the thing. Only rarely will you get the deep breath moment of, "this is the perfect time to.... abc". I spent a lot of my early twenties especially feeling like I needed to wait until "x" to do "y" for no reason other than that's what the norm is, or at least, seemed to be. Using your best judgement (and advice from your circle of close friends), do the thing when you think about it, or as soon as is feasible for you. Otherwise, you may never feel ready.
4. Give the people you care about room to be human. I’m working on learning to give all people room to be human, but I'm not quite there yet. For people that you really love though, give them room to fuck up, apologize, and mend the relationship. Judge them only briefly for making questionable decisions with their lives. Support them when they take a huge risk that you'd advise against and either be there to console them when they fail or to celebrate them when they succeed. Make sure that the people you care about know that you'll always care about them, even when they do dumb shit, and that they don't need to hide their bad decisions from you. Don't withhold your love and affection as compensation for behaving in ways that you find acceptable. The people you love are allowed to do thing that you'd never do.
5. The things you spend time working on and building in your twenties absolutely matter. Life will sometimes shake you down to your core, and being solidly rooted helps you not to completely collapse when it does. I'm so glad that I took time in my twenties to do some work on myself, because I feel that it's made me an exponentially better woman. Facing the things that I dislike or am afraid of, or have been avoiding, is an integral part of being a healthy adult. That doesn't mean it's not still hard, but I've always felt better for having done the thing, even if it totally sucked. This is one thing that I hope to continually work on, because facing these hard things makes the number of hard things much smaller.
6. It's okay to want things that are completely conventional/traditional/stereotypical. I think particularly for those of us who are extremely online, it can seem like we’re less unique because we actually want the things that society say that we should want. It's also completely fine to not want those things. Another lesson in this vein has been that there's nothing about me that makes me undeserving of the things that I want. I've noticed that I have a tendency to preemptively mitigate disappointment by telling myself it's fine not to want something because whether or not I get it is partially or completely out of my control. So I sat myself down and said, these are the things I want (and don't want) and it's perfectly fine to want (or not want) them. I even wrote a list so I wouldn't forget (or talk myself out of them).
