#THIS WAS TOTALLY UNPLANNED OKAY IT STARTED OUT AS A ‘IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO’ POST BUT IT GOT TOO LONG TOO FAST

[shima-draws]

So uhh this was totally unplanned but apparently I’ll be posting a Tododeku Christmas oneshot tomorrow. It’s super fluffy. (Hastily and quickly written, but fluffy nonetheless.)

[pyrofleurs]

i turn 23 in a month and had a small crisis about being an adult so i wrote about it

fair warning, this is p corny and questionably written but when i finished it i was like, hey, i feel like i did a pretty good job articulating my feelings, it would be cool if i had some sort of blog platform to post this on, and then i was like oh god i guess i do have a blog and this is it. so, here it is. i’d say its kind of in the same vein as that 2018 year in review rambling essay i wrote back in january lol. enjoy??

I am 22 years old. In exactly one month, I turn 23. The number 23 is a bit of a gross one to me, both because it seems uneven and messy, and because it's the first year in which by age alone, I could not pass for a college student to some rando who happens to look at my driver's license and see that I was born in 1996. At 23, it is undisputable that the numbers show that I am a "true adult", which is terrifying, because it implies to the general public that I am no longer deciding what to do with my life. It implies that I know by now.

Even if I don’t quite see myself as a “real adult” yet (and it seems like most people never really do), I still have to make decisions that will impact my life years down the line, all the way till I'm 30 years older and looking back, and then even more. To me, this is what is so terrifying. I look ahead in my mental map and see tens of hundreds of possibilities, all different ways that my life could pan out. But the longer I wait, the longer I put off any number of big decisions, the harder it can be to attain them. Is that actually true? Honestly, I have no idea. There is no shame in starting late, whenever that may be. But right now, I have the opportunity to start building my life at the "ideal time", according to advice blogs and my parents and my college career center, so I should probably take it.

So, I wrote down three ways my life could potentially pan out in the next 10 years, at least in a career-oriented sense (I’ll spare you most of the details), and these are my observations:

The one thing that is constant in all three scenarios is that I am totally uncertain on how I feel about all of them. Rereading my (pretty ridiculous, if I’m being honest) paragraph-long debriefs on each career path, I say "I could", or "I would", or "I might". I could stay in my current role in a corporate job, but it's not my dream industry. I could work towards making my “passion projects” a full-time job, but I would sacrifice steady pay and healthcare benefits. I could get my masters degree in the industry I want, but I'd go into debt in what most likely will be the middle of an economic downturn.

My biggest fear is that I will be so afraid of any of these potential consequences that I will not commit to any of them. I am afraid I will run out of time.

I oscillate between "I'm only 22, I have plenty of time to figure things out", and "I'm 22, these are the years where I will make decisions that will affect the rest of my life, and I need to act accordingly right now". Am I wasting money by moving out? Am I going to wait too long to make a career change and end up stuck in a job I'm sick of? Am I going to pursue my master's degree and switch careers, giving up a steady job in the process, and graduate in the middle of a recession with massive student loan debt?

Do other 22 year olds think about this the way that I do? Will I look back on my 20s as a 30 year old and realize I wasted what could have been the best years of my life worrying? What about when I'm 40, thinking about my 30s? What about after that?

I'm always looking forward to what I want next, always grasping for accomplishments that are slightly out of reach, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this is what keeps me going. Part of me knows that I have goals I will never reach, but I love imagining the possibility anyways. I like to look ahead at what my life could be if, in a few years, I've met the goals that I've set for myself now.

But—why do I feel unable to start living my life right now? Why do I feel like my ideal life will only "truly" get going once I get a raise, once I get an agent, once I get a book deal, once I get a girlfriend? What am I missing out on, right now?

I suppose what I'm trying to say is this—I have always lived my life this way. I have a problem of looking at the big picture too much, but when I look back on my memories that burn the brightest, they're never of the "big things". Two moments from the past few months that stick in the back of my mind include going to a Capitals playoff game in April, and a Khalid concert in July. Both unplanned. One expensive, and one free. Both of these events I decided to go to the week of. I didn't plan them out at all. They were not included in my "big plan".

I didn't need a raise to enjoy either of these moments. The memories wouldn't have been sweeter knowing I had a book deal, or if I was in a steady relationship. I screamed and cheered, jumped up and down, chanted my favorite player's name in a 6-0 win, and went to bed with a sore throat. I sang along to beautiful music, some songs I barely knew and some I knew by heart. I soaked in the hazy technicolor atmosphere and ate popcorn until the kernels got stuck in my teeth and the salt melted into the sides of my cheeks. If I choose to stay at my current job instead of pursing my dream career, will those moments diminish? If I get my master's, will changing careers stop me from doing all the other things I love to do? 

The answer, to these questions, at least, is no. Sometimes, my indecision hurts, as if I can feel my future slipping away as I painstakingly weigh one option over the other. I study budget spreadsheets and watch TED talks and read blog posts, craving direction as if there is one magical answer to it all, as if studying would help me get a passing grade, as if there was anybody actually administering a "test" to me in the first place. 

I think at some point I just need to admit that I can, in fact, overprepare—or at least overthink. It is detrimental. When I studied in school, for AP exams and college finals, I could tell when I had studied enough. It would be 2am, and my eyes were glazing over. I couldn't take in any more of the information even if I tried. After a certain point, I had done all I could do in the moment. What I really needed was rest. 

So, I think that's what I'll do. On one hand, I do need to be prepared. I don’t want to just wander aimlessly through my 20s, assuming that one day I'll just wake up and have some sort of ideal life I’ve always wanted. I actually need to get there, somehow. I can't be passive. But the best I can do is start moving forward, one day at a time, and accept that this is good enough. I can't skip ahead. I won't get some big flashing sign of validation that shows me that what I've chosen is the best possible path, meticulously selected and pursued out of every single outcome that I've ever calculated in my head. But I truly don't think it has to be. In every one of these timelines, I'll have good days and bad days. I'll have moments of victory and regret. But above all that, knowing that I took action and made deliberate decisions for myself will always be a stronger choice than hanging back and wasting time and feeling safe in my inaction. I'm afraid of change because the thought of failure is much more daunting than the thought of things staying the same. I just assume that future me will have it all figured out.

But, obviously, I am future me. And I am present me, and I am the shared and lived experiences of past me. And I've done pretty well so far, so there's no reason to think that all of a sudden I'll ruin my life just because the decisions I may make in the future are unfamiliar, or scary, or not what I thought they would be when I was 15 or 20 or even 22. 

I think I do a pretty good job of taking care of future me. I have a plan—well, maybe too many plans. But I have ambitions, and goals, and I make time for others and also myself. It's a hard balancing act, as literally anyone would say. There's no reason to think that any one of the paths I've detailed out for myself would stop me from loving myself, my friends, my family, or a partner. It won't stop me from experiencing the moments that make me glow on good days or that drag me through the mud on other days, just to make it out okay on the other side. But above all, if I want to find out what actually happens 10 years from now, whether it’s one of the options I wrote out in detail or something I never could have imagined, I have to make one big decision, and that is to get up and go figure it the fuck out myself.