So, I just turned 24 in sunny Portugal, and it was one of my favourite birthdays yet. It rained - but it didn't matter. I still jumped in the pool.
A whole pizza to myself for lunch, followed by the pub, where we spent the afternoon drinking pints of Somersby Apple Cider (which tastes like apple juice, by the way - dangerous stuff).
Liverpool beat Manchester City 1-0, and to top it all off, we had a delicious meal at a local Indian restaurant (chicken bhuna, lamb bhuna and prawn bhuna, mushroom rice, bag of chips, keema naan and 9 poppadoms - you get the jist). The night ended beautifully with a prosecco date with my boyfriend in the jacuzzi on our villa's roof terrace. Watch out, Molly-Mae and Tommy.
Anyway, in all this carefree revelry, not once did I stop to reflect on all those times the thought of being in my mid-20s (and a year off half-a-century) scared. me. to. death.
There's something about our 20s being a period of uncertainty - a period where we put pressures on ourselves to be, well, making it. You see, when I was a teenager, I thought that by 24, I'd:
Be moved out of my family home;
Have travelled the world;
Be engaged to the love of my life;
Be making a wedge in salary;
And - well - have my shit together.
Turns out, after three years of uni, a global pandemic, and flicking through jobs that just weren't for me, my golden plan fizzled out.
Sometimes I get kinda freaked out by my age - by the morbid thought of growing older. I was Facebook-eligible 11 years ago. My prom was 7 years ago. I started university 5 years ago and have been a graduate for nearly 3. I'm closer to 30 than I am to 18.
Sometimes, I put my date of birth into something and find myself in inner turmoil as I scroll further and further down the list to 1998. Sometimes I worry that I've taken the times I'd scrolled for not so long for granted. I feel scared at the reality that life is passing me by, that there's so much I should have achieved by each milestone that's arrived with every trip around the sun. I felt it when Dolly Alderton wrote that she was 'moving out of the realm of the fantasy "when I grow up" and adjusting to the reality that you're there; it's happening." Ouch.
So I asked myself - where's all this anxiety creeping into me from? Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of the connectivity that social media brings us. But with it comes that dreary flip-side of the coin that injects in us severe bouts of 'comparison-itis'.
Will it be heads or tails, today - Hannah? Heads sees me flicking through LinkedIn and saving posts that inspire my writing and productivity. Scrolling through TikTok and categorising my liked videos into folders for inspiration: gym, recipes, outfit inspo, wedding ideas (to my boyfriend reading this, I just like looking, you can chill).
On a tails day, I find myself in a bottomless pit of skinny Instagram models on a beach somewhere, scrolling, scrolling, endless scrolling; as I sink further and further into myself before punching 'keto diet' into my google search bar, followed by 'how much is a boob job'.
Why do we do it? Why do we torture ourselves by comparing what we don't have with those that do? There's a wide array of categorisations when it comes to us early-to-mid-20-somethings: some who are married, some who have bought their own houses, some who have had babies, others who are travelling the world, and some who are still happily living at home (yep - that's me!). Seeing other people around my age have their lives play out so differently from my own pace makes me wonder - why am I not at "that stage" yet?
And then it dawned on me. We set ourselves ridiculous expectations. What planet was 14-year-old Hannah on when she decided she'd have it all by 24? Who on earth did that bitch think she was? Life isn't The Sims 4, sweetie.
I've had a hard-core obsession with the tv show Friends. Yes, it's funny. Yes, it's relatable. Yes, it's cosy. But most of all, it's because the characters are both lovably flawed and attainably achievable.
In Season One, each of the gang is 24 years old. T-w-e-n-t-y f-o-u-r. And does anybody have their shit together? Absolutely not. Granted, they're renting *unrealistically* snazzy apartments for a 'friggin' steal' in Greenwich Village, NYC - and that's probably less to do with 'rent control' and more to do with a contextual oversight on the writer's part. But otherwise, their jobs are a joke, they're broke, and their love lives are DOA.
Relax - you don't need to catch up to others. It's ok to not have a plan, and sometimes it's ok to not even have a "pla".
I vow to make my twenties my new teens, and my thirties will be my new twenties. And if I still need to achieve what I'd hoped to have accomplished at 24 by age 34? Ummm - who cares? Life hasn't got a timestamp.
Our 20s are our first decade of being an adult, so it's ok if we're still trying to figure stuff out. Our 20s are the trial run of doing things we've never done before. Our first shot at adulthood, our first period of being left to our own devices.
Our 20s are for 'figuring out' - yes. But figuring out our passions, our people, our values. What makes us happy. What breaks our hearts. We may cry ourselves to sleep some nights. We may wake up some mornings and be afraid to face the day. But we'll also find the most profound and blissful beauty in the littlest things. A Saturday night in cooking dinner. A good night's sleep. Submitting our tax return. A warm cup of tea. A pat on the back at work. Sometimes we've got to let go, stop obsessing over the 'big milestones', and just let life happen to us.
So what if you're in your mid-20s and feeling a little stuck? It happens to the best of us, we've got to just go with it.
I saw a TikTok the other day that made my heart feel warm. It gave the analogy that being in our 20s means that we're only in our Season One of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, and how validating is that?
I think it's time we all gave ourselves a break.
Oh hellllll no, not that kind of break.
Hannah x