This week, on Thursday, April 18th, I turned twenty-five-years-old. I am quite literally at the quintessential “twenty-something” age –– smack in the middle of my twenties and still figuring things out.
Twenty-five is an age that has been looming ominously over my head since I entered my twenties, inspiring so many complicated feelings it’s almost impossible to surmise them all. But, as a writer (read as: professional yapper), what else can I do but try?
At twenty, I started writing what I had believed to be my first novel. Inspired by the death of my grandfather, as well as the beautiful Greek traditions that I’ve been raised with, the novel was a love letter to my family, to my culture, and to my grandfather himself. The first fifty pages of the novel served as my creative thesis for my creative writing BFA, and I went on to write over 30,000 words of it (which is no small feat!). While planning out my thesis, I boldly stamped my foot on the ground and declared that I would have this book finished and published through traditional publishing by the time I turned twenty-five.
I have not touched the novel in three years.
There is a lot of discourse about former gifted kids and the pressures put on us that follow us into adulthood, but there is no pressure quite as unique, horrifying, and crushing as the pressure a former gifted kid places on themself. My delusions of grandeur infiltrated my brain so deeply that every time I pushed off writing more of the novel for any reason –– be it writing myself into a corner with the plot, general writer’s block, or what ended up being late-diagnosed ADHD — I would berate myself so viciously that I wound up no longer wanting to write. I went over a full year not writing anything creatively besides a yearly April poetry challenge (and even doing that in 2023 was like pulling teeth). I set an expectation for myself, and when it became clear that I was not going to meet it, I forgot how to do my passion for fun. And I plan on finishing the novel eventually –– I believe the story is strong and it’s a story that I know I need to tell –– but I have spent the past three months re-teaching myself how to write for fun, for me, and without these incessant pressures that I place on myself.
Yet while I unlearn these behaviors, turning twenty-five initially filled me with dread, with the damning knowledge that I had let my twenty-year-old self down, and the sensation that I am slowly wasting my youth and heading further to an expiration date. Our society places so much value in child prodigies, young geniuses, and the idea that a woman is at her most valuable when she is barely-legal (hello Leonardo DiCaprio) that my initial gut reaction to aging is “oh God, I’m running out of time to be relevant. I’m wasted, washed up, and no longer young,” which is an objectively insane thing to think at only twenty-five. But if I know it’s irrational, why can’t I shake the feeling?
There is a flip-side to all of this, the other side of the coin of the dread of aging. Turning twenty-one during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic definitely stole a few years from me in a sense, but at twenty-five I feel as though I am reclaiming that early-twenties youth somehow. At the beginning of my twenties, I focused so intently on my studies and career, and I was in a relationship that I was convinced was going to end in marriage; in a way, I was determined to grow up too fast without even realizing I was doing so. I was so prepared for the rest of my life that I was forgetting to live in the current moments of my life.
But between struggling in the job market and getting dumped, I’ve found myself this past month in a state of –– for lack of a more eloquent term –– just vibing. Everything has been pulled out from underneath me and it’s forced me to truly live day-to-day instead of with a ten-year plan. I get to experience the magic of hanging out with my friends, both in bars and at home, and being hot and drunk and carefree and listening to way too much Chappell Roan and just being young. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing at any given time, and that is equal parts anxiety-inducing and liberating.
I spent the evening of my twenty-fifth birthday at a book-themed bar, checking out other hot people and slinging back Alan Ginsberg-themed cocktails like they were water and simply enjoying being in the moment with some of my closest friends gossiping about my celebrity crush (NHL superstar Matt Rempe hmu) and it was simply fun. I think I’ve spent the last five years so organized, planned out, and rigid that I forgot how to take it easy and enjoy myself. That’s not to say I’m thriving in unemployment –– I would confidently cut off my left pinky toe if it meant getting an entry-level job in publishing –– but it feels as though I’ve finally let go of some of the residual anxiety, that feeling that at twenty-five I’m past my prime, and am finally living for the first time ever.
I think I will always have a complicated relationship with aging; I’m definitely someone who has a “Peter Pan Syndrome” and idealizes childhood in a way that may not be the most healthy. But in tandem with that, I think that having my life so up-in-the-air right now might actually be the best thing for me. If anything, it’s taught me to slow down, to not set such lofty expectations for myself, to just be along for the ride. Because it is in these moments that I not only get the best inspiration for my writing, but also when I feel the happiest and most alive.
Though, I’m still not sure about dating apps. That may be the one thing I never get too used to. We’ll see.