18 Things You Need To Take Advantage Of While You Still Can

1. Being young and cute enough to still be bought drinks on a semi-regular basis.

2. Being able to soul-search and change your life direction without it being considered a crisis of sorts.

3. Your parents heath insurance for as long as you still have it.

4. The grace period for your student loans, or rather, if you can still remember that beautiful period of time, as you look ahead with the understanding that you’ll be indebted until the day you die.

5. Actually having enough free time to do Pinterest crafts.

6. Still having enough of your life ahead of you that there always seems to be something to look forward to without really having to try and find it.

7. Being able to come home to your apartment and be responsible for nothing but laying on your bed with wine and $1 pizza.

8. The (very) short-lived ability to be able to not do the dishes or your laundry and not seem like an adult that has no control over their lives but just a bustling, busy 20-something.

9. The time in your life in which you don’t have parents to answer to anymore or a spouse to answer to yet.

10. Being young enough to be misguided and directionless and have it still, somehow, be fairly acceptable.

11. Actually being able to move as regularly as you’d like without it greatly affecting anybody else.

12. Knowing your paycheck is entirely yours (… and the government’s).

13. The realization that your ass will never be this upright and thus it’s time to take advantage of being young and hot and not the creepy old person at the bar looking to get laid.

14. Being in the twilight of being able to get away with having teen fiction on your bookshelves… teen fiction of which your read regularly.

15. The celebrations that are about you. Soon enough the only things society really deems worthy of celebrating are basically your marriage and children so enjoy being showered with checks and appreciation for what you’ve done independently while that’s still a thing.

16. Just the sheer joy of being able to put the weird and beautiful shit you love around your apartment, and even if rent is a pain in the ass, knowing that you have a home of your own.

17. Being able to travel and stay in hostels and backpack around while you still have the mind and body that can handle that kind of adventurous, adrenaline-rushing uncertainty.

18. The first feelings you get when you’re out on your own. The first clothes you buy and don’t have to feel guilty about spending money on, the first meals you make for yourself and realize you spent time on them because you care enough about yourself, the first time you take a walk around your new city just because it enchants you, the first time you bring someone back to your home and say thank you and mean it when they say they love the color you chose for the walls. Still having that childlike hope and wonder over the fact that you could walk outside today and run smack into your next great love. Because this part of our lives, where things are new and fresh and unknown and exciting and waiting to be unfolded is a twilight that too many people rush past for the sake of certainty. Fuck certainty. Ride with the tides.