truths i know at twenty-five

old enough to know that most of it does not matter & young enough that you still care about all of it anyway

I wanted twenty-four to be everything.

I wanted to accomplish it all. I wanted my life to be so full it was bursting at the seams.

I think there’s some truth that the universe won’t open the doors you’re meant to walk through until you are the version of yourself meant to walk through them.

I had accomplished so much in the twenty-third year of my life that I expected the same, and more, from twenty-four. But so much of twenty-three had not been for myself. There was so much reliance on external validation in it all. I did want it for myself too, but it didn’t matter enough to me and for me alone. I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like any thing I did was never good enough, and so onto the next project I’d go. The eldest daughter curse you could call it, I guess.

So when I wanted everything from twenty-four, I expected it to be just as grand and amazing as everything at twenty-three. But to live a life constantly seeking the approval of someone else is to live a life that is never yours.

I cried on my twenty-fourth birthday. Cried while waiting to be wished well by some of the people closest to me and desperately wanting to be celebrated. I was in a city where I knew no one, and feeling incredibly forgotten by those I did know. It’s pitiful to acknowledge and admit, but it was probably one of the loneliest moments I had gone through in a long, long time.

I tell you all this to make a point that I was not ready to see a year of the biggest moments of my life. I was sure of myself and comfortable being alone, yes, I always have been, but I was not profoundly proud of myself and what I had done or could do. I was not ready to see the world, or set a PR, or earn a degree. None of it would have mattered enough to me because I could not be truly proud of all the work and time that moments like that garner. The past year was an utterly slow year in terms of accomplishments to the point it took me a deal of time to even think of what I could list.

Everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going. Yet I have been just … standing there. Watching time go by and wondering why I couldn’t feel it pulling me anywhere in particular. They don't tell you that falling behind and standing still can feel exactly the same. The worst part is wanting to go, but not knowing what you're even supposed to be running toward.

All my life I had been chasing things that looked good from the outside. And convinced myself that if I just got there — to the thing, the title, the moment — I would finally feel like a person who had arrived. Who knew what I was doing. I have spent so long needing someone else to tell me I was doing well before I could believe it. Like I could not fully exist unless someone else confirmed I was there, and I had done the thing.

And as I look back, I think that is why twenty-four fell still.

The room has to empty out. And then it's just you, standing in it, with no audience and no one to tell you whether you're doing it right.

I used to think the doors would open when I had done enough, but now I think that the universe does not waste its thresholds on the versions of us that are still living for someone else's idea of who we should be.

And so I turn twenty-five, the steadiness is starting to feel more like my own. I am doing things now because I want them, and I am wanting things now because they are actually mine to want. That is something I had to earn the quiet way, in a year that asked everything of me and gave back nothing I could hold.

I am not sure I can explain what it feels like when that shifts. I had found myself, somewhere along the way, less interested in being witnessed and less concerned with what my life looked like from the outside and more tender toward what it actually felt like to live it.

Twenty-five feels like the first year I am walking into as myself. All the years before this one, I think some part of me was always slightly ahead of where I actually was, or slightly behind, or somewhere just adjacent — reaching for a future self I thought I was supposed to already be, or apologizing for a past one I hadn't yet forgiven. There was never quite enough stillness to just be the age I was.

I will not pretend that twenty-five feels like clarity. If anything, I am more lost than I have ever been — and I mean that in the way that only makes sense once you have lived it. The world is bigger and stranger and more directionless than I knew how to prepare for. I have shed so much to get here — so many versions of myself I outgrew, and lives that almost were. And what is left feels more me than anything I have ever stood in before. I am not who I was at twenty-two, or twenty-three, or even the girl crying on her twenty-fourth birthday. But she needed to exist and I needed to be her, in order to know the truths I know now at twenty-five.

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twenty-five truths i know at twenty-five

I think what you know to be true evolves as you age, and I don’t think that make any of what was true to you before any less true. Everything that feels true to you is true to you at the exact moment you feel that — some of it you might learn otherwise or outgrow and that’s normal. At twenty-five, I have a list of things that I know to be true.

1. being twenty-five means you’re finally old enough to know that most of it does not matter and young enough that you still care about all of it anyway

2. an accumulation of ordinary days is actually what makes life life

3. things you make do not have to be useful to be worth making

4. nobody actually knows what they are doing

5. you have already survived every hard day you were sure you wouldn't

6. your body is not an aesthetic project

7. you will watch someone get everything you want and feel happy for them and complicated about it, and holding both of those things at the same time does not cancel the other out

8. a trip alone gives you a piece of yourself you couldn't have found at home

9. ambition and uncertainty about that ambition can exist at the same time

10. you will plan the trip, overpack for the trip, and then rewear the same three things the entire trip every time

11. antiques are not old junk — they carry history in them and feel like more than objects

12. grieving the version of your college years that never existed because of the pandemic is valid

13. at some point you started caring about where your olive oil came from and there is no coming back from that

14. disappointing someone is survivable but disappearing into their expectations of you is not

15. you cannot outrun exhaustion forever, and your twenties will teach you that whether you want the lesson or not

16. there is a version of competitiveness that makes you smaller and a version that makes you better

17. you are allowed to be both deeply in love and deeply your own person at the same time

18. waking up early does not make you better than people who don't but it does make you feel that way a little

19. you will start to love the parts of your culture you were embarrassed by when you were younger

20. the highlight reel of a person's life is not their life

21. your mid-twenties is officially too old to be working out without warming up

22. knowing someone's coffee order and their worst fear and the way they sound when they're tired is one of the most intimate ways of knowing someone

23. depth is not something everyone values

24. every race you will question every decision you have ever made and then cross the finish line and immediately sign up for another one

25. there is no age at which everything clicks into place there is just the ongoing project of knowing yourself better

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I’m excited for 25. In my mind you don’t even see your prime until closer to 30 (or later), so I am looking forward to another year of learning and growing.

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