Life is a f*ckboy in your 20s 💔

Being in your 20s is a constant state of an icebreaker activity, where you are thrust into rooms full of people you’ve never met. Commitments are piled high and there’s avid responsibility to grow the hell up, get a good job, pay rent, get a mortgage if you can, find a stable partner, get a pet, don’t lose your youth though, maybe start Botox, figure out your 10-year plan, make good career moves – find a career or at least use your degree, break up with your current boyfriend, travel the world because you can, go into debt, make time for your girlfriends, party like you’re 18, take the bins out, keep your house clean, go on dates, read books, climb the ladder, get engaged, find your style, make sure you look respectable, get a decent car, create an aesthetic living space – life – YOU. Your 20s are bullsh*t. 

How is life supposed to be enjoyable when you’re in constant conflict with yourself and where you’re supposed to be? This is cliché but it’s not necessarily social media that pushes this agenda; it’s our friends and family, the distance one gets when moving away from university and getting your first big-girl job - in an office or other industry, where you work with every age group and try to find your labelled box. It’s off-handed comments from the 50-year-old mums, the student intern, the old-boss-geezer, your grandparents, your parents and your friends. It’s an immediate halt in partying and living out of an empty fridge, and a change to affording nice skin products, the organic canned beans, regular nail appointments, replacing something when its broken, giving gifts to people, sending flowers, going out for coffee. It’s everyone’s lives being so different from your own that it tries to pull you in every direction like a physics experiment, where everything becomes static, and gravity is confused. 

It’s not all bad, your 20s is a psychedelic infusion in small doses - the flight home after seeing your friends for the weekend, morning coffees after a beach walk, the Friday night wind-down with a glass of vino, cuddles on the couch, shopping hauls on a Saturday, lazy Sundays with a coffee on the outdoor furniture, family dinners, and the feeling of promise when you get paid. Life reminds you that things are possible. It loosens the reigns long enough for you to chase your passion in hopes that you can quit your job and live off poetry payments. 

So why is there so much pressure in your 20s? The second you graduate sh*t gets real, real quick. What if all I want to do is go back and sit in the what-ifs for a minute longer? What if I move back in with my friends and start a hobby business and be creative and forget to take the bins out, occasionally, and find the essence of my youth again? Will all these elders give me a break and let me fail and quit my job and resurface with some experience first? Maybe this rant is about me and my job - my very adult job as a high school teacher when I am quintessentially 18 and thrust into maturity and all-the-knowledge at 24. What happens when I try something new and let go of a career I have spent my whole life working for? What happens then…20s-am-I-right? 

I’ll leave you with this rancid wine induced poem: 

Life Is A F*ck Boy

Life is like a loose hug from a man who ruined your life 

when you see him at a party with your friends. 

It’s the you look good long time no see         how have you been.

Life reminds you that you’re on good terms even when it guts you from the inside out.

I suppose that's how it keeps you here. 

Haley x