“Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old”.
In 2 very short months, I’ll be 25 years old. A quarter of a century. How the fuck has that happened? I can remember so vividly being 17, standing at a bar with my dodgy fake ID in hand, legs trembling, sweat pouring off my forehead as I waited to see if it would work or not (It usually did, but I think that was more due to corporate greed than it actually being a convincing forgery). Those were the days.
Now, I have a real ID and I don’t even get asked for it. What was the point of getting a driver’s licence?
So much is going to change. Whenever I fill out a survey, I will no longer be able to click on the 18-24 age bracket. Adverts will no longer be targeted at me, unless they’re for funeral homes or hearing loss. Or back pain. So much is unknown too. Am I soon going to develop a taste for red wine (because I’ve always thought it was fucking disgusting and people keep telling me it’s an acquired taste)? Am I going to feel an urge to start wearing knitted jumpers? Am I going to start thinking seriously about taking out a life insurance policy?
I know I’m being slightly dramatic, and I hope I’ll never feel the urge to start wearing knitted jumpers, but the fact remains I am getting older and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
I think the reason I’m struggling to come to terms with the eternal and unstoppable forces of ageing is because I am not exactly where I thought I would be at (almost) 25. Like many people, I believed from everything I was taught at school, and from what I saw on TV and in movies, that by the time I was 25 I would have it all together. Career, car, big house. All that good stuff.
I would be a fully functioning “adult”. Whatever that means.
Things have not turned out this way.
Instead, I’m in my 2nd year of a 4-year degree after quitting my meaningless job of 4 years, which was the closest thing I had to a career, and I still don’t feel like an “adult”. I always assumed that one day I would wake up and realise I was now a mature and responsible person, but that day still hasn’t arrived. Maybe it never will.
And thank fuck for that.
I don’t think my problem is a fear of getting old, or of not being successful, or not being on the right track, my problem is that I believed that we all have some schedule for our lives that we are all supposed to stick to, and any deviation from that schedule is a tragedy. That by not having “made it” by 25, that was me, fucked forever. And that is not the case at all.
It’s far too easy (and dangerous) to compare yourself to other people, to your friends, to celebrities, and what they’ve accomplished in their lives. But doing this doesn’t make any sense. People are so unique and different, so why should we all be expected to progress through life at the same pace? If you aren’t working in your dream job in your mid-twenties, if you’re not making billions of dollars, if you haven’t found that something that you’re really passionate about, if you feel like you don’t have your shit together at all, is it the end of the world? No. It isn’t, and it’s crazy to think so. There’s plenty of time for you yet.
And time is exactly what it takes to figure things out.
I like to think of my life between the years of 18 to 23 as “the wandering years”, like some filler chapters in a book that will get cut out in the editing process. Some of my friends knew what they wanted to do as soon as they left school. Some of them took a year or two to figure it out. Some are still figuring it out. I didn’t have a clue what it was I wanted to do with my life at that point, and if I forced myself down a path I wasn’t sure of, it would have ended in disaster. For me, it took these wandering years before I started to get a grasp on what it was that I cared about and felt some passion for (which is writing long-winded rambling blog posts for your reading pleasure, obviously).
It took being directionless for a while to find some direction. I had to make a few fuck-ups before I started to get things right, and if someone had told me beforehand that we all move at different speeds, I might not have been so hard on myself. It might also have encouraged me to make some more fuck-ups, but that’s not the point. The point is that we all experience life completely differently from each other, and you get to decide how to measure where you are in yours, no-one else. There is no yardstick except for the one you create for yourself. So try not to be too harsh.
Now here I am, almost 25, and despite being on the cusp of qualifying for a pension, I am comfortable (apart from all the aches and pains that come with such advanced age), and I am happy. Really happy actually. I am full of optimism for the future, and a big part of that is because I’ve realised that the only schedule I need to keep is my own, and I’m the only one in charge of it. Until the day comes where I find myself in a career with a demanding boss who creates a schedule for me, but that’s the ultimate goal in life anyway, isn’t it?