"I don't wanna take the world for granted
While I'm still trying to understand it"
-Love & War in Your Twenties" on Dark in the City (2018) "
This Time It All Started With…
My personalized daylist playlist by Spotify.
What is a daylist playlist by Spotify, you ask? Good question!
Spotify released a new feature called daylist which is a personalized playlist that shifts and changes throughout the day to accompany your “mood changes”.
In their release of this function, Spotify explained it as a “one-of-a-kind playlist [that] ebbs and flows with unique vibes, bringing together the niche music and microgenres you usually listen to during particular moments in the day or on specific days of the week”.
My favourite part about this feature is the titles of the daylist. As I’m writing this blog entry, I am listening to mountain music crunchy Saturday early morning.
Let’s get back on track. Jordy Searcy.
“I don’t wanna take the world for granted. While I’m still trying to understand it” is only one of the many lines from the song that resonate with me. This song is filled with phrases that go straight to my heart.
As a twenty-something, I can confirm that our feeds, Tik Tok FYP, Pinterest, conversations with older friends or family members, book suggestions, etc. are all filled with comments along the lines of “your twenties are for having fun”/ “What nobody tells you about your twenties”/”10 books to read in your twenties”/ “your twenties are for experimenting”.
And while these comments are meant as encouragement, they add more panic to our (us twenty-somethings) process of trying to understand the world and how it works.
After having done this “twenties thing” for roughly five years now, I have some thoughts:
Being in your twenties is kind of like going through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Stage 1: Denial – The day of your 20th birthday your first response is to be excited because you have finally reached the point in life that all the 2000s movies portrayed as ‘fun’. But after your 21st birthday, that quickly changes into you pretending you aren’t in the beginning stages of the terrifying twenties. Your mental space is filled up with mourning the loss of your teen years and therefore you decide to rather deny the truth.
Stage 2: Anger - As you start moving out of the denial stage and moving closer to 23, the feelings you’ve been suppressing start to float to the top and the denial changes into anger.
Whether you direct this anger onto your plants, family members, or lecturers – it doesn’t matter. This stage could include some of your friends getting engaged, getting promotions, moving across the world to pursue their dreams…
What matters is that as the anger subsides, you start to think more clearly and realise that being in your twenties could be more fun than you anticipated.
Step 3: Bargaining – As soon as you realise you could perhaps be able to have fun instead of panicking about your future, you start creating various “what if”/ “if only” moments. These could be moments where you finally step out of that comfort zone that has been holding you back or chase that dream you’ve been holding on to for 5 years (but only in your mind).
“What if I…then I would finally feel productive”.
“If only I could do so or so…then I would finally be successful”.
Step 4: Depression – The moment you realise that you perhaps did not know yourself as well as you thought you did.
When you realise that there is a lot of growth that needs to happen and perhaps it might not look the same as your friends’ growth.
Because this thought terrifies you, your “fight or flight” mode kicks in (a.k.a. just your “flight” mode). This stage can feel very overwhelming and isolating.
Stage 5: Acceptance – But somewhere in the overwhelming and isolating feelings of your twenties, you reach a point where you start to understand the true meaning of your twenties.
You realise that this time of your life is only a small percentage of what you are still going to live and that you can use this time to learn more about yourself.
Not every day may be a good day. Some days will be harder than others – especially if one of your friends achieves a big life goal that you haven’t (such as getting married of having a baby).
But that is okay.
Stage 5 reminds me of one of my favourite poems that I have been referring to during my twenties: “The Panic Years”, a monologue by Elle-Louise (listen here).
This blog post represents your twenties in a sense.
You start out optimistic and excited about all the possibilities - you have a picture in your mind of what it will be like (exactly how I thought this post would be about Jordy Searcy’s song and his powerful lyrics). But along the way (roughly at about your 22nd or 23rd birthday) you realise that expectations are not at all the same as realities. And that sometimes, what you planned for yourself, could turn out to be exactly just that – a plan.
Sometimes a plan to write a blog post about a song that moved you could turn into a word dump about being in your twenties instead.
So, Dear Reader, I thank you for taking 10 minutes out of your day to read my word dump.
And for all the 30+ year-olds reading this post, please do continue sharing your “Your 20s are for having fun”/ “Your 20s are for experimenting and exploring the world” comments with us. I fear they might just be the hope that keeps all the twenty-somethings going!
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