Compelling Things Our 20s Are For Figuring Out

15 Compelling Things Our 20s Are For Figuring Out

Written by BRIANNA WIEST, Oct 18 2013

I think our 20s serve as both an unexpected healing ground and a great precipice for the delightfully unknown. You can spend a lifetime figuring these things out, and you should, but there is a very unique kind of medley of happenstance that happens when one finally reaches the point of feeling as though they are both free and bound, dictated and choosing, mourning and loving, honest and perpetually feigning their truth. These are the things we come out with on the other side of that.

1. Letting go of little things is important, but learning to let the big, unchanging truths sit next to us comfortably is even more so. We can spend all our time letting go of the pants and friendships that don’t fit anymore and our first lost love whose ache is continually dulling anyway and giving permission to anybody to dictate who we are, but none of it will ease the burden of what we’re really trying to get to. The little things can go, the big things need to be painted in the picture with us no matter how cracked and sad they may seem.

2. You never look bigger, better, stronger or wiser when you incessantly need to be right. You look like a big person when you admit that you’re wrong even in the most humiliatingly trying of circumstances. You look big and true and honest when you apologize. When you say goodbye to someone you honestly know you won’t see again and when you tell someone you love them even if their response may indeed feel like it’s going to kill you. That’s the real work of it all. Those are the heroes of our generation. Those who know what it means to be radically honest, because accepting that in ourselves opens every door to accept it in others.

3. You cannot save anybody but yourself.

4. Loving someone is not what people struggle to let go of. It’s the expectation that they have for what loving someone should mean.

5. The fact that largely, we do what we want to do at the end of the day. Few things stand in the way of sheer will power. It will all come back down to whether or not we really, truly, would-go-to-the-grave-recklessly-pursuing-this want something, because when it’s enough, nothing will be acceptable barter.

6. You can’t build something for the long term that you can’t stand in the short term.

7. People will tell you that because you choose differently than them– to be out about your sexuality, to be a writer, artist, piano player in a local dive bar, whatever it is– that they are only hesitant and concerned because you will have a “hard life.” The truth is that a hard life is not being true to yourself. People will use that feigned concern for your well-being as a way to avoid having to completely support you and love you even though you have chosen differently than them.

8. Life demands shit. Life has to kick the mother loving crap out of you before you’re removed enough from the mask of society to really start to live freely and happily. Life demands you give up your shit to get there. Give it when it calls.

9. We are always asking the same question, and it’s whether or not it’s okay to be who we are. The people who we bond in friendship with, the people we fall in love with, the people we find ourselves relentlessly attached to are the people who answer that question with a “hell yeah.”

10. You’ll always feel as though you’re too much of something and not enough of another. Stop measuring yourself with other people’s rulers. Consider how maybe they’re too much and not enough compared to you.

11. We have to dismiss logic more often than not and pay attention to the things that call us despite our hesitations. We have to pay more attention to when our hearts are irrationally pounding and all evidence points to the fact that this may be an incredibly rash and dumb decision because that is just the moment in which you have to make it anyway.

12. There are parts of you that you need to keep sacred and loved. Parts that need to be acknowledged and worshipped, and they’re often the parts that need the most healing. Stop burying them because you’re ashamed, and let them out in the light to be loved like they so desperately need.

13. There are a few things you can never let go of: the fact that the savage inside of you need not be repressed further, but nurtured and expressed healthfully, that nothing is permanent, especially you, that discomfort is a huge and unchanging part of life, that this is all just a ride and that love, truth, honesty and kindness are what’s most important.

14. Nothing is coming to save you. Let yourself sit with that for a second. It will feel like rock bottom. Stay there for as long as you damn well need to. Lay down at rock bottom and look up at everything that you fell from. When you’re ready to stand, you’ll climb your way out by your own volition, and there will be no other hands to let go of yours, and that’s what’s most important. Nothing is coming to save you. We eventually have to let go of the idea that there is.

15. When you unravel yourself far enough, you’ll realize that we all come down to the same thing. To evolve means to unroll. Difficult times don’t change us, they revert us farther back into our true selves. We can choose to embrace that with ease, or life will do it for us, and until we finally wave that white flag of acceptance, it will be a hell of an internal battle. It’s the first rule of anything and everything that matters– you have to learn to be okay with whatever comes and whatever goes, whatever is given and whatever is taken, and to realize that none of it, in any way, will ever determine you who you are. _________________________________________________________ I haven't fully understood everything written here yet. Some unsettling truths, and many points made sense.