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"How Can a Person Know Everything at 18 But Nothing at 22?"

  

Taylor Swift was right. 


I don't think anyone could have prepared me for how 22 would be the most confusing age of my life.

 

Being 22 is physically feeling the growing pains but no matter how much you push through it feels like you’re stagnant. It feels like the world has already passed me by and I didn’t seize any opportunities or build anything worthwhile. I look at everyone around me and even though I know you shouldn’t compare myself to others I can’t help it. One friend already has a job. The other one is making plans to study abroad. My friends are falling in and out of love and someone is getting married.  

 

What about me? 

 

I'm still stuck here, and life is passing me by too fast. It feels too late but too early to do anything. There are so many things I could have done by now that I didn’t, but there is also still so much more to do. 


You graduate thinking this is when your life will really begin but no one warns you how hard starting over is. How scrambling to fill in voids of your time starts to feel suffocating. How lost you are without the routine you have built for the past five years. How outside your academic achievements you don’t know who you really are. 

 

It's such a bitter pill to swallow. Some part of me knows this will pass like how my last year of high school eventually passed or how my freshman year of university eventually passed. But I’m exhausted of pretending that I'm beyond it. That I’m okay with where I am now or that I've accepted this. Because I haven't. 

 

I don’t know how to accept that I am not the same person I was when I was 18. Or that I accomplished so many of the things I didn’t think I would, but I also failed at the things I thought I would accomplish by now. I don’t know how to accept that I forgot what my interests are or what brings me joy. I don’t know how to accept that I need to play the role of the adult when my inner child didn’t heal. I don’t know how to accept that I need to move on and apply for jobs in an oversaturated job market and swallow every rejection while still pretending it doesn’t hurt my pride. 

 

The future scares me. Some part of me thinks that maybe I missed a memo somewhere, because every time I glance around me and see how well everyone is doing, I feel like I’m utterly alone in feeling this way. The loser in the corner that’s too afraid to step out. 

 

Maybe that is what I’m missing. Courage. 

 

Who knows really? I really wish this chapter of my life came with an instruction manual.


-hammie

1:42 am

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