“It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You
can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you
spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t
left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow.
Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true
depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more
alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not
sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at
living than you are.
A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just
had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult
life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at
you now. La di da, it’s happening.
Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you
like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and
over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole
life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for
sissies,” your father tells you wearily.
You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all
it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind
you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your
youth.
You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake
up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if
it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of
friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to
go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends
feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in
your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in
the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared,
less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed
off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like
later.
Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every
day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question
your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have
you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties
hostage.
Stop thinking that everyone is having more s*x than you, that
everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having
more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!)
but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve
already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like
you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast
dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything.
I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if
a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active
participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d
like to think that people get better each and every day but
that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s
their stories that end up getting forgotten because we
can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better.
Our normalcy depends upon it.
You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for
your life. This sort of sh*t doesn’t happen overnight but
it can and will happen if you want it. Do you want it bad enough?
Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump
your fear of living today?
We shall see.”