A few years ago my therapist told me that in my twenty’s I would experience some of my best and worst memories of my life. She explained that the low’s would be really low and that the high’s would be really high. It wouldn’t be until sometime in my thirties that the high’s and low’s would balance out, allowing me to get off the rollercoaster. Interestingly enough, I have also heard that the late teen years throughout your twenty’s is the most easily recalled memories in old age with diseases like Alzheimers and Dementia. Working as a nurse, I have personally experienced hearing older people exclusively talking about their lives lived in this “twenty something” decade, dementia or not. Something has to be said about this phenomena, the emotional roller coaster sucks as we live it but clearly it’s what we will reminisce on when our time is eventually coming to an end.

What really makes this decade so hard? Or are we all just whiney, entitled “gen-zer’s” who can’t get a grip? Hurdle number one. The decision paralysis that you feel is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. When you’re twenty four with ambition, you quite literally can be anything you want to be. The opportunities are endless and everyone around you constantly reminds you of this. When there are so many options and opportunities and you have no idea what you truly want, it makes us all freeze. Then we sit there frozen unsure of what really matters to us for way too long.

Second, the making of timelines that only get destroyed. Eventually we have to pick some sort of path because of us can’t just walk around life sniffing the roses forever. We pick the career, the relationship, the town and we start envisioning what our timeline will look like. We get comfortable in that timeline and a tornado comes and absolutely demolishes said timeline that we got comfortable following. Now the future is impossible to envision and we are forced to pick a new timeline. Gross.

Third, what sparks quickly burns up even faster. We connect with people both romantically and on a friendship level very deeply and without much thought. Part of this decade is the ever changing uncontrollable circumstances that make maintaining these connections next to impossible. I’ve found that partners and friendships come and go for reasons that are out of my control. My “imaginary wedding guest list” two years ago is nothing similar to who is on my list today. The days of friendship out of seeing people in class everyday is long gone, most of us now couldn’t even guess our friends middle names or their birthdays.

Another one thats slightly depressing but all to true is constantly feeling lonely even when we are surrounded by a dozen people. The nagging loneliness is unreal because not many of us have found our “place” yet. We are still trying to create our world which leaves us feeling like a pawn on everyone else’s game board. I can tell you, I’m tired of being the pawn. I want my own game board that I have some control over. I want to be a game piece of importance, one that can do more than just blindly move one space at a time.

Next, is the building without having a clue what the final product looks like. This is one of the hardest facts of life and quite honestly I think the remedy to this is as simple as “having a little faith”. Constantly laying bricks without knowing what exactly we are building towards is discouraging. It makes many of us wonder, why we are even bothering building in the first place?

Lastly, constantly feeling like the clock is ticking, that time is running out, even though realistically we are all still at the beginning of the race. In the grand scheme of things, we have so much time and the clock isn’t going any faster than it was before. But that feeling that life is moving too quickly and we aren’t where we want to be is constantly bugging us. We end up making decisions out of fear instead of making decisions based on our true wants and desires.

After seven paragraphs of negativity…I do have some positivity. Like I was warned, the low’s are super low and the high’s are super high. My drive to push myself, try new things and do things that scare the shit out of me has helped me create memories I know will last a lifetime. I think we all have to go through feeling insecure and lost to be happy with ourselves when we “grow up”. I don’t feel like a grown up right now, despite what the government says about what constitutes an adult. I feel like I am in a transition period, fighting like hell to sort out which direction is the right one to go in.