As time goes by, it dawns heavily on me that I am no longer a child. Your twenties are a very awkward phase of your life.
I like to think of it as the childhood of adulthood.
At that stage, you are definitely not a child. However, you don’t really have all it takes to be described as an adult. More often than not, this juncture of life finds us adrift on a tattered raft amongst the turbulent waters of life and confused as hell. You have been a teenager and someone’s child all your life that defining yourself as anything other than that seems intimidating and overwhelming.
Some nights as I lay staring at the ceiling in the dark embrace of my room, like dementors, the reality that I don’t have my life at all together haunts me. My life reminds me a bit of a male college dorm: cramped with garish posters of future goals on the wall, ideas strewn all over the place like clothes and desolation presiding humidly over everything. Sure, the room cleans up nicely. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that there is really no method to this madness.
Isolation is a survival tactic I learned as a teenager and perfected in my twenties. I have learned to avoid malls, markets, and anywhere I might see old friends, classmates, or extended family members. I treat shopping like delivering ammunition across a field filled with landmines.
Get in.
Zig when necessary.
Zag at other times and get the hell out.
That’s the only way I can avoid well-meaning questions like “What are you doing now?”, “How’s life treating you?” or “Hope there is someone in the picture?”
Admitting my life is unraveling at the seams feels a lot like failure- truthful failure, but failure nonetheless. On social media and my contact list, I see young people in their early, mid, and late twenties doing exploits in their different fields and consistently proving that youth can be resourceful, productive, and successful.
And then there’s me, watching memes and reading threads on cat Quora to ignore the nuclear disaster that is my life.
Comparing the neat origami of others’ professional life to the papier-maîché, fourth-grade project that is mine, I can’t help feeling I am failing splendidly though the match just started. From twenty-one-year-olds with four-bedroom houses, twenty-five-year-olds with three (successful) startups and seven streams of income, and twenty-three-year-olds earning amounts I only see in my dreams, it seems everyone gets the hang of this adulting thing, everyone except me. I know you probably think speed up culture is the reason I feel like this but I can’t help feeling there’s something more I have to do.
The other day on Twitter, someone asked a question:
“How old were you when you made your first million”
Me internally:
The answers started rolling in:
Twenty-one,
Twenty-three,
Twenty,
Twenty-two,
Eighteen.
Everything changed when the fire nation attacked with a reply: “Depends on the currency in question…”
This little online episode was once again proof that while everyone in my age bracket was running (and winning) marathons, I seemed to be running on a creaky treadmill, moving but never really making progress. The sad part about all this is holding yourself so well together people don’t believe you have problems. Each time you open up, they look at the well-packaged catastrophe that is you and go, “Nah, you’re kidding. I know you make a lot and your life is just peachy…”
The other day, a friend of mine made a post about how a certain lady that earned “just” 120,000 naira monthly (⥲$240) was trying to broke-shame him (that I presume earns higher). The unspoken problem between the duo was not and is still not my business. What caught and held my attention was the fact that the money he had referred to as just was something I had never, ever earned in the years I have been working.
When asked for a solution to remedy my professional woes, the answers are painfully similar:
- Touch up your LinkedIn page
- Open a YouTube account! it’s so a la mode now and with consistency and great content, you’ll earn so much
- Write for Medium, they pay you with each read you get
- Learn copywriting
What they forget to tell you is:
- LinkedIn is filled with so many suited crooks out to exploit eager and desperate creatives.
- Human beings are very visual. No matter how good your content is, once your background and video quality don’t look good, you are going to have a hard time getting views.
- Medium’s payment plan doesn’t extend to (African) writers based in Africa (particularly sub-saharan Africa)
- Asking for what you are worth as a copy or content writer is akin to deciding to remain broke (which is the point I am at now (raises glass)
My social life is roadkill at this point.
No, wait. I think “unicorn” is a better analogy as my social life is nonexistent. I am indoors all day staring at either a screen or page of written words or a screen of moving images.
The relationships in my life, romantic and otherwise, are hemorrhaging. I watch calls from friends ring out multiple times because, in the economics of friendship and conversation, I have very little to offer these days. In my twenties, I have learned that being a good, loyal, and passionate person is not enough to sustain a romantic relationship. There are a lot of mental gymnastics and emotional tugs-of-war I cannot keep up with. Love interests run in and out of my life like trains at a station.
And the ones that do stay?
Well, let’s just say they either stay long enough to resent me (or I, them) or end up silently viewing statuses on my WhatsApp.
Romantic relationships are one area of my life I am not sweating.
It sounds odd saying this when I am in my twenties and am expected to be all aflutter with worry at the lack of love interests. I believe with time, things will straighten themselves out, and even if it doesn’t, I will learn to live with them. However, what concerns me is people being concerned about the fact that I am not concerned about not having anyone “at this age.” Carrying babies is no longer about cute babbles, sweet-smelling baby powder, and their adorably small but firm grasp. These days, it’s all about:
“Aww, you’re so good with them! Can’t wait for you to have one of your own!”
“Motherhood will look good on you. (looks pointedly at the four rings I wear) are you married?”
Me:
Make no mistake, I think babies are impishly divine. However, as a 21st-century proletariat in my twenties, I cannot afford to have one yet. Thank you.
When asked what I do, I scramble around furtively to summarize my skills as economically as possible. I end up sounding like a fake with a great deal of knowledge. This is one downside of being a multipotentialite/scanner. You know a lot of random- but important- things but cannot seem to condense them into a cohesive job title.
There is something about your twenties that forces you to stop dreaming. Everyone makes it a point of duty to remind you that dreams are for children and you are now an adult. Following your dreams often means saying goodbye to consistent paychecks. Sure, some people follow their dreams and make it big but they’re few. Most end up working shitty jobs by day while their dreams keep them warm at night.
Just like 1920 and 2020, your twenties are more or less the great depression. Everything hits you at once.
Responsibility.
Bills
The need for a feasible career trajectory
Adulthood.
It can all be so overwhelming. Adulthood teaches you a vital lesson in failure. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. In failing, you learn to be strong and take more risks. You realize failure is not the worst-case scenario; not getting another chance at winning is. However, failure can sometimes pummel out the will to try again, and that’s where depression starts. You send out 45 job applications and get 15 saccharine polite rejection mails and 11 vague we’ll-get-back-to-you-when-we-have-another-opening. The rest don’t bother replying. To remedy the situation, we do what we do best: escape.
Ten hours of Twitter and following savage threads for those days, you feel angry.
Instagram when we feel like self-loathing and comparing our lives to everyone else’s.
Scrolling aimlessly through all your social media timelines for the numb days.
You can stand the depression, the sadness, and the wrenching disappointment you feel in yourself each time you get a rejection mail. However, what you cannot stand is this creeping, vacuous indifference that is consuming you bit by bit.
You can see thirty in the not-so-distant horizon and the thought you haven’t achieved anything worthwhile. Explaining all these to someone else sounds pathetic. Everyone has stuff they’re going through too. So you tell yourself to man up and carry your cross with grace even as you break daily. No one told you adulthood was all about smiling through the painful stabs of a thousand glass shards. And on days when you and your friends do talk about it, you all laugh uproariously at your flailing mental health. But behind the raucous laughter is a subtle but ever-present fear of what life and the future hold.
I miss being a child.
I miss when boys/men were forbidden, and all I had to do was get good grades.
I miss when month ends just meant another month was coming.
I miss when dreaming with eyes wide open was encouraged; a time when I had the security of my dreams to fall back on.
I miss when the rat race was just a funny movie on ETV and not an employment option.
I miss when birthdays were just about cake, gifts, and growing up as opposed to growing older. These days, impending Decembers render me catatonic. I realize time is slipping away like water through a wide mesh sieve as the weight of age presses down on me. I keep hearing this persistent ticking. Like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, I feel I am running out of time to achieve all I believe I can achieve.
I wish there was a manual to this madness, a surefire way to hack this phase. The advice I get from social media, self-help books, and everyday people is often contradictory.
Make the best of your twenties, some say, they are your defining decade.
Others assure you there is time, after all, 30 is the new 16, and 40 is the new 23.
Yet another group believes you should wing it and elbow through your challenges as the spirit leads.
I know there is no right or wrong answer, as one approach might work for some people and not work for others. However, I am afraid of picking the wrong option. What if I decide to go with the first and it turns out the second, or the third, was the right one for me?
I am currently reading 101 Secrets for Your Twenties by Paul Angone and The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. Hopefully, I might find something useful and finally have days when I go to bed fulfilled. If not, well I guess I’ll just keep being twenty-trying and twenty-tired.
P.S: This post is meant to be a light-hearted introspection into the realities of being in your twenties. These days we are so hooked on social media it dictates what we feel reality is or should be. The truth is most twenty-something-year-olds don’t have it together, no matter how “wealthy” or well together they look- and that’s ok. It is all a process.
We all have different timelines and it’ll all come together sooner or later. It is ok to sometimes feel you are lagging. However, it is not ok to give up on your dreams or yourself because of that. I am rooting for you.
Originally published on Medium.
Whew! That was a tough one. Like what you read? Check out:
Dear (Nigerian) Writer, You’ll Suffer for something reflective
The Unicorn Called Unconditional Love, if you, like me, often ponder on love and its trappings
Multipotentialism and the Kaleidoscope World of Scanners to discover a superpower you probably have but never knew about.
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