I honestly feel like I just turned 20 last week. I remember waking up to my room decorated by my friends and cake and flowers and cards waiting for me on my dresser. I was so happy to wake up to that that I pretty much went about my day in a bit of a haze, accepting birthday wishes with a smile and getting ready for dinner with my parents that night. Going out to eat that night, I loved seeing the look on my mom’s face when I would remind her that I would be 21 in exactly a year, and I reveled in the praise I got about “the wonderful adult I was turning into” from my dad. Like most birthdays, it went by way too fast and I found myself alone in my room that night getting ready for bed, and I’m not sure if it was just build up from other things or just classic me overthinking everything, but I just sat down on my bed and cried. It must have been the weight of knowing that I was finally in my twenties, the decade of life where so much changes and you make huge life decisions that can impact your entire life. As a teenager, I always looked forward to my twenties as being the decade where I would graduate college, marry my soulmate, land my dream job, move somewhere I have always wanted to live, and maybe even have my first kid. And sitting on my futon in my room that night, finally beginning that decade, I realized that I wasn’t ready for any of it, but still it would come creep up on me day by day no matter what. I’m not saying that you need to have your life together by 20 years old, but as someone that needs structure and a plan in their life, there was no way I wasn’t going to feel at least slightly underprepared. At 20, you are just as far away from being 30 as you are from being 10, which, oh my god, should just not be allowed. But now, as I sit here waiting for my junior year of college to start and with less than a month until I turn 21 (which is officially closer to 30 than 10), I still only know just about as much as I did when I turned 20.
I don’t know why I have this expectation in my head that each year of this ~magical~decade I’m supposed to move mountains or have some huge accomplishment or a realization for who I am, but I do, and it festers in the back of my mind a lot more often than I would like. That’s why, as my 21st birthday gets closer and closer, I am filled with a bittersweet feeling of being excited for feeling like a real adult, but also knowing that it comes with a lot more baggage than I might be ready for. I guess all I can really do is what I’ve been doing for the last twenty years of my life, which is doing my best and hoping for the best, and based on the people I have around me and the road I’ve been traveling on, I’d say I’ve been doing a pretty decent job.
