From wasted 20 years of my life, make it 20 years down, forever to go!

Shout out to all the vicenarians out there! How are you coping up with life, it must be really tough. Right? Starting off with a very famous Koyoko Escamilia saying, “Your 20s are your selfish years.” You are old enough to make the right decisions and young enough to make the wrong ones. It is a decade where you immerse in every little thing and take decisions that could lead you to utter destruction. 

It’s like I blew my sweet sixteen candles a few days back where my friends my elders told me that being sixteen is the most beautiful experience. You will grow up, develop, live, love and sow the seeds for your future. Work Hard on yourself, they said. I can still hear the echo of that happiness and excitement in my mind that I felt while blowing off that bright, sparkling and colorful “16-digit” on my birthday cake. 

Being in the 20s is like the Renaissance period in one’s life where you strongly believe to have done enough work on yourself and that your personality has been completely groomed and carved out of that silly old child in the past. Right then, you walk past that shining “my soulmate” kind of figure and your whole world turns upside down. You turn back, stop, and stare for a while; your heart, in complete disagreement with your mind. The battle starts as soon as you start sinking into this pool of pink and glittery slime; famously known as love, and ends when you realize that you weren’t wearing a life jacket while the person that you reckoned as your soulmate is nowhere to be seen around you. That is when you start suffocating on life. You fall off the cliff, into the limbo of recurring mistakes. You crave attention, love, intimacy, and respect which mostly you are not going to find any time soon. This will drive you crazy, like a spoiled rich child throwing tantrum on not getting his favorite remote control car which he knows his parents can easily afford.

Yes, Parents! They play a very major role in our 20s. They can either build their children, help them in growing and blooming into someone strong and revolutionary or break them into someone who is weak, ridiculous and worthless. The 20s is the era where you start feeling the vacuum of this huge gap developing between you and your parents. You start loving your parents more, start taking them more seriously and feel more need for their support, however, at the same time, you deliberately distant yourself from them; both physically and emotionally. Long story short, you need your parents the most, but you don’t need them intervening in your matters all the time. You seek their advice, but you are not ready to act upon it. You want them to keep a check on you, but you don’t want them to stop you from anything. You feel like a legit infant who has suddenly grown up into an adult. 

The 20s are like a constant tussle between what you so badly want and what is actually right for you. Spoiler Alert: You always make the wrong choice! 😀 You make wrong friends, get carried away by your emotions, lust, desires and get addicted to toxic relationships. You drive on the edge of the cliff knowing all the risks and dangers, yet somehow you want to give everything a try. You want to give everything a try, even when your gut feelings are telling you to stop right away. Every turn reflects a warning sign, every crossroad dead end, yet you want to move forward. You want it to work! You want your dreams to work so bad because you are blinded by the thick haze of youth, which disables the view of deadly reality.

It seems overdramatic, sometimes merely childish when I talk about this topic but I think we all should have the courage to admit and accept that we are growing, growing old and plan accordingly. I am 23 years old, not too old to be talking like this, right? But I should! Because it is difficult not just for me, but for most of us out there. Considering the fact that we all have a different definition of difficulty, maybe another 23 years old would have different 20s-life-catastrophes, as would call it, however, the fear of “running out of time” is the most common and toxic aspect of the 20s. You want to do so much, but somehow you realize that either you wasted the majority of your time doing nothing, or else you have way more serious business to tend to. You want to study more, but at the same time, your budget raises as you grow further and your parents’ interest in affording your luxuries decreases simultaneously. You are jobless and broke, you want to do part-timers but either your studies schedule or else, your parents wouldn’t let you do that. You will fly high in the sky of independence but your feet will always be shackled by the debts and interference of your parents. 

You don’t feel like talking too much and even if you want to recall good things, most of the time they don’t sound as exciting as they used to be for you. The reason could be the fact that just because you have recalled them so many times, have told the same childhood story to millions of people, again and again, they have lost their charm. You don’t feel like laughing your lungs out on petty mistakes you did in your sweet childhood, rather the only things you can bitterly laugh at are the failures that welcomed you at the doorstep of your twenties. Failed relationships, trust issues with the people whom you believed in, unable to share your mistakes because they were, well too obvious mistakes, but still, you were genius enough to commit them. 😀 You feel guilty of rejecting the right things for the wrong ones even when the whole world tried to convince you that you were wrong, but you, on the other hand, were so busy in proving yourself right.  

You fall in love repeatedly without knowing that is is because deep inside you fear solitude. This is the time period when you would love to be in the limelight, you will always, always want to be the center of attention, would love to see yourself on the billboards, in the front pages of the magazines, in the headlines and where not? You would care for small things like plucking the flowers out of the volcano’s channel, but totally ignore the fact that the volcano is about to explode on your head. Makes sense? I know right! But this is what we all do, mostly.

See that perfect and bright smiling portrait of your batch photo? Spoiler Alert: Nobody is actually smiling and you will realize it at the farewell when only two to three genuine people out of the rest 200 will ACTUALLY wish you goodbye. Peer pressure is yet another baddie-bad aspect of this time where you are in the fast lane on the highway of competition. You want to be the best and would never settle for the less. Also, welcome to the hell if you are a tough competitor! Cold glances and weird smirks from your colleagues during the presentations, jealousy over grades, promotions, academic favors, and achievements, envy, and derogatory remarks on failure. It couldn’t be any worse. You have to work your heads off in order to remain at the top or else you would be like a rat that got eaten by my cat last night; finished! Your professors would stop encouraging you, they would stop giving your examples, but rather start mentioning you as the pitiful example of the fall of Ozymandias. 😀 You open up your mail in the morning and the rest of your day is wasted in the arguments inside your brain like his article got published, even hers did, but why the hell is this stupid editor not responding to me already? I am wasted! It is such a disgrace! Oh well in reality, no it’s not, in fact, this attitude of yours is.

Tiring days, sleepless nights, sobbing evenings and over-thought afternoons, our 20s is the golden age in the time span of our life. We all face a certain magnitude of pain, a stream of social and public criticism, and a constant war between love and reality, mind and soul. We lose our charm caring too much about the appearance of shining silver hair amid the deep black twilight of our youth and complaining about the fine lines on our once fine and plump faces. We forget the fact that the real charm is not the reflection of how beautiful you are, but how strong you have been throughout your life. The world saw the shift from “She is sexy” to “Brain is the new sexy”, and I totally preach. You have to start looking at life from a different perspective. It may seem a little selfish at the start, but then again we are not responsible to make everything right. We are not responsible to fix others when we are not feeling strong enough to hold on to our own lives. The life in front of you is way more important than the life behind you. 

They say that the lines of your face tell about how you’ve spent your life, fine lines of forehead reveals that you have wasted your whole life frowning upon things that meant nothing at all and you are now going to regret wasting your energy on them, however, the lines on the corner of your lips reflect that you have spent a happy, and laughing life and you have made happy memories to cherish for the rest of your life. Your skin will wrinkle ultimately, be it dehydration, bad health, excessive makeup or aging. Stop caring about them appearing, in fact, make sure to get these fine lines around the corner of your lips so that you could live without regrets and there is always this happy frame for your lips to fit in every time you smile.

Indecision is like buying time to fool yourself a little more.

The 20s are awkward! You feel too old for this and too young for that. You are going to make many mistakes so be wild, live every moment and embrace whatever you do. Make promises, stick to them as long as you could, stay happy and make this world a happier place to live in both for yourself and others. One should just focus on making the next right move. One move at a time, but whatever you do, make sure you feel like doing it and commit to it with 100% loyalty and dedication. You don’t need to know where you will end up. None of us is responsible to be punished for what goes wrong in our life. We all are trying and we make mistakes!  Just take action and it does not need to be perfect. Indulging in indecision won’t help you at all. Indecision is like buying time to fool yourself a little more. Once you start acting on whatever feels right, there is nothing that you cant change. Iterate Iterate Iterate! Always remind yourself of the bigger picture and know that everything will work out. Everything works out eventually if you just believe in yourself and never give up!

Adios,

xoxo <3