Twenty four years, five months and fourteen days.

 It’s such a strange age, I probably say that every year. Maybe it’s a strange life. Mid twenties are like shopping, walking down all these amazing aisles of produce and you want everything but you can't afford it. Actually that’s too literal, I can’t afford anything. 

It's more like you’re online shopping, browsing and imagining yourself in every pair of jeans or shoes you see. You see your life being so utterly different than it currently is. You’re swiping and taking yourself away to fantasies of a better life, imagining scenarios of a job that respects you, pays well and you actually enjoy. Fantasising about romance or buying a house or having babies. Dreaming of travelling the world. All of these fantasies live inside your phone and as you scroll through these possibilities, you’re met with the reality that your peers actually have some of these things. You’re hit with a crashing wave of jealousy. So you spend your days comparing your life decisions and daily activities with people on the internet, who probably wouldn’t remember your name if asked. This age is rich with possibility but rarely delivers. It’s a mix of missing out and being there for the important things. Being pulled from friend to friend, cancelling plans, working non-stop and panicking about money and the future. The future, your ‘real adult future’ feels far away but so do your care free teen years. So where do you stand? In the middle of a road with no clear signs and directions, no instructions in front of you. It’s clear when you look at the dozens of twenty four year olds I know that our life decisions can be so vastly different at this age. Some with babies, some with overdrafts, most with anxiety but some married and some perpetually single. The story of our lives are so varied as are our personalities, wants, needs and desires. So why do we torture ourselves that we’re not doing enough or moving fast enough? Some days I feel so stricken with the panic that my life is a race that I am losing. I don’t truthfully want to race anyone, but I act as if I’m racing myself to the finish line. Like my life is a contract, a finely tuned list of instructions and to do’s that I’m not working through quickly enough. 

I constantly break my life up into two sections, now and future. In the future I’ll be happy, successful, wealthy, married with babies and a big house. I’ll be my ‘goal weight’ but somehow have bigger boobs. I’ll be busy but really content. I always live every day as if this current life I’m living is just a practice and that one day I’ll be ready for the real, adult, future. (Completely in denial of course that I am actually currently an adult.) I do this because it’s easier, if there are certain parts of your life you aren’t happy with, to pretend that this is just the practice, the rehearsal. It’s easier to convince yourself that your real life hasn’t started yet, it’s a coping mechanism to protect you from the life that is currently trying to engulf you. Life is really messy, confusing and complicated at the best of times, it’s never supposed to be easy. And of course the lesson we all learn is that the life you’re striving for, the life you’re so desperately crawling towards is of course a fallacy you’ve built up inside your head. It’s a fantasy for a reason, it doesn’t exist. Even if you catch up to a couple of the so-called ‘dreams’ you have, they’re never how you imagine them to be. The dreams and fantasies we have, live more comfortably inside our heads, because once they escape they don’t survive in the real world. If you put your life and your dreams on a pedestal, every action you take and every circumstance of your life has to fight to compete with those dreams. Some of the best parts of my life (including my incredible boyfriend) are things I could never have dreamt of in my wildest fantasies. The happiness I feel, the contentment and enjoyment I get from these things are real and raw emotions, far from any fantasy I could have conjured up. While I do live in two worlds, the real one and the one inside my head, I’m trying more and more as time passes to content myself with the world around me. 

The truth is there are so many things I want to be, so many lives I want to live. I think about my future a lot, there’s nothing wrong with that. But my problem has always been that a life inside my head, whilst comforting, isn’t tangible and can’t be properly enjoyed. I can’t live my life inside my head and never venture outside of it. And to accomplish even a small percentage of the goals I have bookmarked for myself requires me to be present in the moment, to be open, honest and hardworking. I need to stop allowing myself to imagine this ‘dream future’ is waiting for me at the end of a very smooth and easy road. This age fosters so much comparison and doubt. I doubt myself every single day, I doubt my decisions and where I’m going with my life. But I think I need to allow myself to be an indecisive twenty four year old with no money and not many plans. The endless possibilities of my future and the ever blossoming happiness of my present are things that I used to long for. I think this time, whilst confusing, should be nurtured. One day I’ll be older and probably wiser, I’ll look back at this time with fondness, knowing that I survived it.

Molly,

xx