Your 20’s: The Middle School of Life
Growing pains, without the braces.
Over the summer on a long meandering bike ride through the beautiful mountain town of Jackson, Wyoming, I was engrossed in deep conversations about life with a friend. We were talking job opportunities, life after college, finding direction, heartbreak, happiness, what we want to do, what lights us up, and the belief that we should have it figured out, when no one really does.
Somewhere in that conversation she said, “Your twenties are like the middle school of life.”
I laughed. Then I thought about it and quickly realized, they are. Truer words had never been spoken. From what I’ve found in my (almost) eight years of being in my twenties I feel I’m back in middle school. This time, without braces, without those awful blonde highlights, and without quite as much sass as my 13-year-old self.
So many unanswered questions. So many curiosities. So many inner voices telling us we should be this way or that way — do this and do that. So much of myself wanting to skip over certain parts and go straight to the older, wiser, has-it-all-figured-out version of myself.
Remember middle school? When instant messenger was the way to talk to your crush? Now, it’s texting. And still we play stupid games of who is going to send the first message and how long we should wait to respond. Still, we wonder if we said too much, too little, just the right thing, or the exact wrong thing. Smiley faces still give us bursts of hope that maybe that one message meant a little more than it actually did.
Puberty happened and we evolved into teenagers and it was awkward and exciting and hopeless all at once. We craved freedom, a driver’s license, and wanting to be accepted. We were 100% uncertain about what it meant to “grow up,” so we tried on new versions of ourselves while we wondered how and why everyone else seemed to have it figured out. We wanted to be liked, accepted, and fit in. To be certain our path was the right path. We wanted to have our first kiss, to have a boyfriend/girlfriend, to get our braces off, to wear make-up, to go places without our parents. Everyone wanted to get to the end goal of growing up, and it sure was hard to understand why other people were getting there before you did.
And yet, here we are. Twenty-something and middle-schooling all over again. Trying on different versions of our adult selves. Wondering how to make friends. (Seriously, everyone is re-learning how to make friends as an adult, it’s not just you). We’re figuring out where we fit into the world and still facing the awkward and the unknown. We’re still looking for acceptance and validation that our path is the right one. The need to “figure our shit out” seems to be the common denominator while we watch our friends and peers grow into different phases of life.
It seems like everyone else is growing up a little faster, a little better, a little more seamlessly. Engagements and marriages and babies and houses have become the first kiss, the first boyfriend, the make-up, and the freedom. The growing up is happening at all different speeds, and still, it’s hard to understand why your pace is your pace.
Like middle school, everyone in their twenties is figuring out how to figure things out. We’re all feeling like we’re doing it wrong but somehow making it work anyway...slowly, awkwardly, questionably. We’re failing and succeeding, we’re forced into big shifts and changes, exploring them nervously and with a brave face all at once. We’re happy and then unhappy and then confused and then unsatisfied and then happy again. Like middle school, everyone is going through the exact same growing pains, but too preoccupied with figuring ourselves out to even notice.
Twenty-somethings, welcome back to middle school, where everyone is wondering how to grow up without doing it wrong. We are the 6th graders, the 7th graders, and the 8th graders of adulthood. We are awkward and we’re learning about ourselves and the world, and one thing has remained true: no one really cares as much as we think they do.
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