Why Being In Your 20s Sucks

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1. You have no idea where your life is heading. You feel as though everyone around you has some sort of direction. Some of your friends might be married, engaged, pregnant, or expecting. You? You’re just sailing through life working a minimum waged job that you swore your college degree would get you out of. Or even worse, you don’t have a job at all. Your life revolves around your friends’ work schedules. You have exhausted every TV series your Netflix has to offer, and there are only so many Fraggle Rock episodes you can watch in one day. You have probably become the sad barfly at your favorite dive and people probably guess you have no idea where you’re going in life. Guess what? They’re right.

2. Being in your twenties is like New Years Eve everyday — such a disappointment. Sure, you have a number of emo songs on your iPod that make you question why you are still alive, but you hope your friends just graze over them while going through your playlists. You hope that your friends think about death as much as you do and come up with horrible thoughts like “Every time someone close to you dies, it’s one less person in the world who loves you.” Oh, just you? Awesome. If you were to listen to Carrie Bradshaw, she says “Your 30’s are to learn the life lessons and the 40’s are to pay for the drinks.” Does it really not get any better? Probably, if Carrie Bradshaw is your go-to for life advice.

3. You seem to have the “You are not a girl, not yet a woman” mentality. You cringe when people at Target call you ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ and you hate being mistaken for a ‘Mrs’ when it is clearly obvious no one put a ring on it yet. Hell, you don’t even have a sexting buddy. You long for lavish themed cocktail parties, fancy dresses and suits, and you can’t wait until you can afford the name-brand vodka. You dream of the day when you can just pick up and leave, runaway to some amazing place like New York, Chicago, or Seattle. Sadly, in your twenties you would totally settle for a weekend road trip and pray you had enough money for gas and food. Being in your twenties is like being in limbo; you are simply waiting to be told what to do, where to go, and how to get there.

4. You feel pressure from everyone and their mother, literally, to be in some sort of relationship. You always need to be dating someone, loving someone, and planning your future together using the creepy-morphing-baby-website. You can’t tell those people who pressure you to leave you alone because you know that they know, deep down, it’s really what you want too…maybe? Another downfall of being in your twenties: each sex feels superior to the other. Girls hate boys, boys hate girls. It’s like elementary school again except this time cooties are real and they are called STDs. You can’t count how many times you hear girls say “Guys are such assholes” and guys respond with “Girls are such bitches”. Yes, you know you aren’t perfect, but someone should be able to accept your type of assholery, yes? Isn’t that what love is? Tolerating someone’s bitchy-ness and assholery long enough to say ‘I Do’ and make a baby? Maybe you have been watching too much Mad Men lately or maybe it’s the truth. Which leads you right to your number five reason.

5. You begin to finally learn the truth. Your parents, who you thought had a great relationship, are actually falling apart at the seams. Your mom, your dad, your uncle, or whoever it is has caught the infamous “cancer of the _____________” and you have to realize at some point that cancer is real. It happens to people you know. It could happen to you. You begin to take off your rose-colored glasses and see the world for what it really is…reality. The reality that you have been eating the same package of Ramen for the second day in a row because you don’t have the money for groceries. Maybe in your twenties you realize that the people who were assholes to you in high school are still assholes now. That’s just who they are, and it’s not the ‘phase’ your mom promised you it was as you cried yourself to sleep every night sophomore year. You begin to realize that people die. You wear your basic black dress for a different reason on that day and mourn the loss of someone you loved. But don’t you do that every day? You lose people all the time in your twenties and they are not always in the ‘lost and found’ bin or in a coffin.

You do your best to remember why being a 20-something really is the best time in your life and why you should strive to be more fabulous every day, even if it is just to show your haters how to hate.

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