12 Reasons Why Being 20 Is Scary

(1) You don’t realize just how much you miss your dad until you think about being away from him for five months when you study abroad. You think it won’t be that bad, because, come on, it’s another country and you’ve never left the tiny town you’ve lived in since you were four. You think that living at college will have prepared you in some way. You think about bars and clubs and more freedom than you’ve ever had. But once you think about landing in another country and being completely and truly on your own, you realize you’re in for a rough time.

(2) Your reliance on using the phrase “I’m just a teenager” when convincing yourself that it’s okay you don’t have your life together is taken from you. Sixteen is no longer three years ago; you need to come up with a better excuse. Or get your life together. But let’s be honest, you’re still lazy.

(3) When you’re not a teenager anymore, the world will expect you to lose interest in boy bands and act more like an adult. You will not do this.

(4) Drinking coffee now seems like your only skill set and yet it fails to provide you with the life answers you want. You’re also no longer ashamed of the mug bowl saucer you drink coffee out of every day and the older you get, the bigger that mug bowl saucer gets. One day it will probably be a basin of sorts.

(5) More of your friends are getting impressive real world jobs that will actually mean something for their future careers. You just hope Barnes & Noble won’t kick you out for reading magazines without buying them and hogging their Wi-Fi every day.

(6) Your obsession with television will begin to be looked at as incredibly pathetic. Your friends may hold an intervention.

(7) It’s probably about time you did something productive and tried to score a decent internship, but you’d rather be working at a pizza shop making three dollars an hour and getting hit on by the sleazy delivery guy.

(8) Enjoy wearing your flower crown while you can, because before you know it you’ll be a middle aged hippie.

(9) Cheap nail polish and your coffee mug collection are what make you most excited, but you’re going to have to give that up soon for buying groceries and furniture and dish soap and responsible adult things for responsible adult activities.

(10) Traveling will probably become less likely as you get older because you’re going to be in mountains of debt when you graduate. Enjoy your cocoon of a college life while you can.

(11) Some of your friends are graduating college or getting employed by accounting firms or are engaged or are just generally pulling their lives together. You struggle to pull yourself away from Netflix and try to convince yourself that starting another television show will not help you achieve your career goals.

(12) Twenty years old and you’ve been fortunate to only lose enough friends you can count on one hand. That will soon change, and before you know it you will forget to contact the friends you’ve managed to keep. You try to tell yourself that you’ll make new friends but for some reason it gets harder every year.

You’re turning twenty, but you’re not dying. Breathe in, find order in your chaotic life, and take it a day at a time.