Letting go of the life you thought you'd have by now

Undoing – Part 2

Undoing is a Bumble x Club Reticent four part series on untangling the lived reality and inert beliefs of a modern woman, then relearning about ourselves from the ground up.

I’m meeting a woman I admire for dinner. She’s older, accomplished, has things to say and poise to last a lifetime. Integrity on speed dial. She says she got where she is now by paying attention to her life. I think she’s not being entirely truthful, because I’m twenty-eight and feeling hunger pangs for the kind of success and validation that render me The Most Important Forever, but it’s been going sideways so I better start taking notes if I want to get anywhere at all. Running frantically, maniacally, spilling secrets all over the table, I’m shaped like fear, and every time it feels it might be getting better, it gets worse.

She’s happy to see me. The heatwave is getting to my head and every breath feels like pool water and uncertainty. We order our drinks extra briny.

“I swear, I’m doing life brute force.” I tell her, sweat streaks down my neck.

“In what way?” She’s unassuming.

Why do we feel like we're wasting our twenties?

And I don’t know how to put it best. The past decade has been stacked with contradictions. I’ve jumped ahead and stood by nothing. I’ve craved love and resented it. I’ve felt the consequences of living in the now, faced the punishment of thinking too far ahead and missing the point. I’ve bitten off more than I could chew against the bruises of wasted potential, negged my proportions and worshiped others’, opting for bland food and blander experiences for the sake of safety, been afraid my risk-taking will amount to nothing but cardiovascular fatigue in the end. Staying broke is scary. But so is making money.

Everyone is ‘figuring it out’ but they’re doing it better, more affirmed, like their instructions are bound by a contract and sealed with fate.

My thoughts don’t quite feel my own. I’m always part of a dichotomy: one day a future hopeful bride in servitude, the next a woman of uninhabited freedom that needs her word to be the last. Social media is ever present and the advice comes off inflammatory. Triumphs are rare, and when they happen, I can’t enjoy them because they feel incidental and contractual. Suffocating on the stale air of concern, forgetting to let anyone see more of me than I would allow on a regular Monday morning, I’ve been afraid of taking the long route or the road less traveled by, begrudged by raw computational power. Drifting through acknowledgment with cruelty, afraid I won’t do anything with the rest of my life unless it comes prepackaged and stripped of its truth.

Simply put, I’ve been afraid of wasting: single-use plastic, youth and energy, social capital, novelty, grit, galore, love. My twenties.

What causes the quarter-life crisis?

But what is this anticipatory grief made of? Timing, mostly. It’s easy to discover and sustain a sort of vacuum-sealed, uncompromised confidence in your special abilities and a predestined path in your early twenties.

Say you’ve been chosen, that you will get everything you want with immediacy and catharsis and a cinematic love story as a bonus. Towards your late twenties, reality kicks in, and the tale starts to contrast: the pace doesn’t match the self-promise. You find that things go wrong more often than they go right, that you’re a much more finite, limited individual than you anticipated that likes to stay home and sometimes can’t get over a thing until it consumes them whole, and that every careless word, miscalculation, and purchase counts in the end, and how you spend your day is how you spend your life.

Now we’re left to soak up our routine, grappling with things taking longer, the turns being steeper, and this destined-for-an-extraordinary-life story being dismantled as a product of not knowing better.

Why letting go of the "extraordinary life" myth can be freeing

In the middle of all this prolonged disappointment resides relief. It’s silent, simple, it doesn’t judge you for your old convictions. When you’re no longer bedridden by the paralysis of thinking ideal scenarios are owed to you, space frees up for you to get to work. Big strides. More oxygen. Rooms you’re welcome in.

Truth is, the ordinary person fails every day. That’s how we learn and get better. The ordinary person tries a lot of things. That’s how we figure out what’s ours. The ordinary person doesn’t ‘peak’ in their twenties. That’s how we have decades ahead of us.

And the sugar rush of quick schemes doesn’t seem as good anymore as the freedom of being just okay, of not keeping score, of existing.

What if an ordinary life is enough?

Was I ever above an ordinary life or just strung out on proving something? The answer is obvious. Suppose I wasn’t ready to hear it. But when I get back home in the evening and it’s still my life, imperfect at the edges, striving for equilibrium, and maybe this is all I’ll ever get to feel, twenties to seventies, as the same person with the frizz in the hair and head in the clouds and non-matching underwear and so much baggage behind, getting in and out of a slip dress, daydreaming in and out of love, that’s all okay. Because I have been holding my hand through it all, I’ve laughed a lot, and, well, I’m collecting meaning.

“You’ll love your twenties in their dissolution. Just relax.” She goes.

My heart aches.