Here’s To Fully Living In Your 20s

Here’s to you.

While our early 20s can perhaps be the most exciting and prolific time of our lives, it can also be the most challenging time. Transitioning from a time of being young, free, and full of life to a time where we’re told to grow up, to be realistic, and get a “real job”.

We’re told to let go of our imagination, our aspirations, and our dreams, when really, those are the very things that keep us young, vibrant, and creative. The very things that allow us to see the bright colors in between the black and white lines that society confides us in.

We’re told we have to have it all figured it out. We’re told we have to go to school, graduate college, and know exactly what we want to do with the rest of our lives.

But the reality is, many of us don’t.

And if we don’t, we feel hopeless. We feel lost. We feel as though we are not enough. As though we are not good enough. As though life is not working for us, but against us, chaining our feet to the ground with a deathly, gripping hold as opposed to allowing ourselves to float high above the clouds and within the stars.

We then take this feeling of unworthiness—this feeling of lack, inadequacy, and not being enough—with us in our everyday lives. We watch it bleed and seep into our health, our relationships, our well-being and our happiness.

But to you I ask: To what end?

To what cost?

To what price are we living in this way for?

Because to you, the person in their 20s, life is not meant to be half-lived. Life is not meant to feel half-dead inside.

Life is not meant to feel as though we are just merely passing by, drifting with time, until one day, our time inevitably comes and we’re left with nothing but time we wish we had back.

We are the ones writing the story. We are the ones creating the legacy, carving the path. We are the ones filling the pages with vast and boundless experiences, memories to last a lifetime, and days that will make us wonder whether heaven does truly exist.

Because in your 20s, you are not meant to just live them without fully experiencing them. Your 20s are not meant to be lost and forgotten in what so often becomes just buried memories in the erased pages that were once our past.

No, your 20s are meant to be explored. To be discovered. To be created.

And if we do them right, if we allow ourselves to just truly float and let go of the black and white lines that society paints us to be in, then perhaps our 20’s will be everything that we ever dreamt of and more. Everything that we could have ever wanted, despite the various grooves, ridges, and cracked surfaces, that encompassed what could be the most prevalent years of our life.

Because then, maybe one day when we’re old and gray, we’ll look back at our life and know that we lived it fully alive. That we didn’t just drift. That we didn’t just settle. Rather, we lived our life with vivid stories, spirited recollections, and times that will always make us smile.

So here’s to you, the person in their 20s.