Maybe Peter Pan has made the right decision. He was right about being an adult; about its complicated nature and its unhappy routines. Not even close to the real adulthood, even in our early 20s, we already wanted to give up.

The thing about entering your 20s is you will be confused about yourself. You are fully aware that something is wrong inside you, there an issue within yourself; but you don’t know what it is. You can’t figure it out just in one night and that thing will linger in your 2AM thoughts or in your lonely Saturday night. You will feel so insecure and not sure about your own problems; you can’t even differentiate between the real problems and your own complicated minds. You want to solve all the issues within yourself but you don’t know how because life doesn’t come with an exact guideline.

In your early 20s, you will feel like a mess.

The thing about starting your 20s is your head will be full of questions. Your mind is a castaway looking for a way out. You will feel lost and unguided; you are looking for some answers day by day. Your days will be full of trials and errors, and you can’t help but thinking about all the life options ahead of you. What if I don’t like my major? How can I get my dream job? What if my significant other is not the one? How do I live my life? Questions, what-ifs, possibilities, failures. In your early 20s, your life is a board game, without some cheats on how to finish it.

The thing about the early 20s is your beliefs will be challenged. You will doubt about the things that you hold since childhood; those values, norms, and principles will be faded by time. You will know that fairness is something subjective, expectations will lead you to disappointments, and sometimes hope is just a word without the real meaning behind it. Your trust will be broken and there will be days when you don’t even know what love is. Loyalty is something rare and you will appreciate those who will stay even just for a day.

At the beginning of your 20s, life will give you some tests to make you doubt about what is right and otherwise; and you have to protect what you believe in, no matter what.

The moment you realize that you are entering your 20s, you will feel a war within yourself. You want someone to always be on your side, but you want to be alone too. You love yourself, but hate it at the same time. You want to let go, but you want to keep the memories alive. You want to move on, but you will do anything to relive the moments. You want to feel everything at once, but there will be days when you only want to disappear. You want to be happy, but you enjoy the sadness as well. You love the people, but you know that you can’t trust them all the time. You want to be in love, but you are not ready to be broken. In the beginning of your 20s, you will be too familiar with contradictory things until it’s so hard for you to decide.

But most of all, the thing about being in your 20s is the realization that actually, your life is limitless.

The truth about being in your 20s is you will meet thousands of people, even more. Your days will be filled with those people who will come and go. They are temporary, but they bring the stories in your life path. Each person that you’ll meet has a magic spell to leave their traces within your heart. Some people will make a shelter within yourself; they will stay inside you and they will always come back. Some of them are like travelers who are waiting for their flights; they said hello and goodbye at the same time. But it’s really okay because you will also have those people who make you feel at home. Those people are the ones you’ll keep close to your heart; because they love you as you are.

In your 20s, the universe will make you realize that family is not about blood relation and a home is not a place.

The truth about being in your 20s is you will visit so many new places. There will be days when you visit so many places in which you’ll never forget for the rest of your life. Those skyscrapers, the airports, the stamps in your passport, the photographs, and the taste of each traditional food will remain forever in your memory. You won’t forget those city lights, the smell of the ocean, and that gradation of pinkish colors of the dawn as well as the sunset. You will fall in love with a place at the first sight and you will be homesick for the place that you’ve never been to. In your 20s, your life is a world map.

The truth of being in your 20s is you will know exactly what really matters in life. As time goes by, you will realize what you are looking for in your life. In your 20s, you will realize that artificial things are temporary happiness. You will know by heart that at the end of the day, it is only about the people you love. It’s all about the happiness when you are surrounded by the people who loved you genuinely, it’s all about letting go the toxic people behind, and it’s all coming up to self-love. In your 20s, you will find your inner peace by time.

But at the end of the day; the truth is, your 20s only happen once in your lifetime.

In your 20s, when thousands of possibilities are coming your way, choose to be alive. Note that no one can live your life but yourself, and when you feel like your 20s are such a mess, the universe will still love you the same as always.