Your alarm goes off, you get out of bed feeling some sort of body pain, your back or your neck hurts. You don’t know if it’s a concern for a doctor’s appointment or you just slept in the wrong position, or it could just be the signs of aging. You go on social media, and you see that someone you went to elementary with got engaged, scroll next is an old high school classmate who is now pregnant with her second child, scroll and someone just posted that they got hired at a reputable company. There are people that are still in college for longer than they should be and are always being asked, “when do you graduate?” (Or is that just me?) Then there’s people who constantly post funny memes on social media who seems to have too much time in their hands and are probably unemployed. Everyone has something going on and it’s just surprising to realize that these people are all in their twenties and on different phases of their lives.
Today, this is what it’s like to be in your twenties. You see people your age doing different things and you wonder if there’s a wrong or right way of doing this adulthood thing. Unfortunately, among the many things that are out of our control, aging is one of them. With age comes experiences and with experiences comes lessons, here I share the few realizations that I’ve had in my early twenties. My hope in sharing these is that if you may or may not relate to them, perhaps maybe you can learn a thing or two.
Our Parents Are Humans Too
When we were younger our parents were our heroes. They seem to be invincible. In our eyes they can’t seem to do no wrong. Until the day we realize that they’re humans too. They have made and can make mistakes. I can imagine how this realization might rock someone’s world as it did mine. And if your parents haven’t disappointed you yet, well wait for it. It’s going to happen it’s just a matter of when. Although this is not a bad thing, it just makes us see our parents in a different light, makes us treat them with more compassion.
Be Who You Needed When You Were Younger
This goes with the previous realization that I had. If you come to think about it, no one really had a normal childhood. Parenting is one of those things that no one really knows how to do, there’s no right way of parenting. Not that I have been a parent myself but there is I think, good and bad parenting like just how badly you can screw up your child. Our childhood explains a lot about the kind of person we grew up to be. Oftentimes the things that we long for as adults are the very things we always wanted as a child. By being the kind of person that we think we needed when we were younger, we applaud our inner child for having survived without the help we needed had back then.
Be Your Own Friend
There’s this line from the movie Good Will Hunting, “we get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds”. I definitely agree, although before we let in someone into our little worlds, we should be our own friend first. “You’re the average of the five people spend the most time with,” according to Jim Rohn. We spend most of our time being with ourselves, we should learn to enjoy our own company before we can be of good company to others.
Everyone’s a little insane. So pick your favorite trainwreck and run with it.I saw this quote on Facebook and I just really have to appreciate the humor of it. This applies to all sorts of relationships, romantic, platonic, whatever people label things these days. I think everyone is a little insane. In deciding to enter into a relationship, we come as broken goods from past life experiences, and accepting the other person for everything that they are also includes everything that they have been through and the things that made them insane. If we look at it that way, we can act from a place of understanding and compassion. So, pick your favorite trainwreck and run with it.
