Last month, I celebrated my birthday and turned twenty years old. Truthfully, I had been dreading this birthday because I really did not want to turn twenty. I am not much of a crier, but I did have a little meltdown the night before my birthday because let's be real, turning twenty is scary. It means saying goodbye to your teenage years while welcoming a whole new decade.

Twenty is weird because so many people are doing different things. I have friends who are engaged, some people my age are on their second kid, there are those who truly have no idea what they are doing from week to week, while some are fighting tooth and nail for their dreams. I have friends who are super mature, and some of my favorite people who still act like we are in middle school sometimes. There is such a wide variety of goals and achievements that we are striving for at this age, and it seems so strange to me.

I know that being twenty means that I'm not a teenager anymore, but I'm also not ready to completely grow up quite yet. Don't get me wrong, I love my freedom, but I am nowhere near ready to be out on my own. Heck, I will still crawl in my roommates' beds if I have a bad dream - how am I supposed to ever move out on my own?!

People keep reminding me that I am almost halfway through my college experience, but I don't understand how. How did I go from eighteen to twenty in the blink of an eye? Where have these two years gone? I still feel just as eager as I did when I first arrived on campus. When did I go from the freshman winging her way through the semester into a sophomore who gets asked for advice (don't ask me why because I definitely do not have this whole college thing figured out.)

Twenty is a little scary. On my birthday, once of my best friends asked me what I wanted to accomplish in the next decade of my life. I thought about it and realized that over the next ten years, I am going to have to make some crucial decisions. I will graduate college, (hopefully) attend medical school, maybe be married - yikes - or maybe just be settled in nicely with a dog. Over the next ten years, I will have grown from a college sophomore to a grown woman. How am I supposed to fit all that into just ten years?

At what point do we transition into grown-ups? Now that I'm twenty, do I have to stop biting my nails? When do I give up cuddling with my parents when I am home? How about the sleepovers with my girlfriends? Is it okay to be forty and call my besties at 2 a.m. for a Taco Bell run? I'll have to decide when to take my nose ring out, because at some point it's time to grow up, right? When are my tapestries and crew socks not really age-appropriate anymore? When do I have to grow up and face my problems? Surely we'll give up Snapchat before thirty right? At twenty, I feel like one type of lifestyle is ending, but a whole new one awaits me, and I just want to be sure that I love that lifestyle as much as I do my current one.

But I realized that I don't have to know all those answers right now. I do still have two more years of college left. I still get four semesters of doing goofy things with my friends, staying out late, and double dog dares. Twenty might be intimidating, but "twenty-fun" is right around the corner. Whatever is after college for us is out there waiting, with all new memories to make. There is still so much life to be lived, adventures to go on, things to discover, records to break, places to see, and people to love.

So, to the twenty-year-olds out there,

I feel you. I get you. I am you. You don't wanna grow up. You want to live in the land of spring parties, loud music, random road trips, epic pre-games, midnight Cookout runs, polaroids, and the feeling of invinicbitilty forever. You want it to always be acceptable to say, "oh, I'm still figuring my life out." As much as I want to hold onto my memories of the past couple of years and not let anymore time pass by, I realize how precious living in the moment is.

We aren't going to be around forever. Right now it's twenty, but then it's thirty, and forty, and then we really are going to be like, "where did our time go?" So, friends, here is to us enjoying our twenties like we enjoyed our teenage years. Here is to us living up every moment to its full potential. Here's to our new decade.