The Juxtaposition of Turning 20

Adulthood hit me like a truck...I recently turned 20. I've left my teenage years in the rearview mirror and have my 20s straight ahead and I'm stuck in a state of juxtaposition. Kind of scared but also so excited for this next decade of maturing, a decade of self-discovery, a decade of truly embracing adulthood. And I kid you not, as soon as I turned 20, I was smacked with all this. Huge responsibilities, figuring out health insurance, work-life balance, taxes, thinking about finances and just so so much. But at the same time, I felt a sense of maturity, a sense familiarity in my school routine, with my friends, my character development is better established. I know it's said that your frontal lobe isn't fully developed until you're 25, but I can definitely tell that it's starting to develop. So even though I have many more responsibilities, I feel like I have some of the tools to take them on, but I'm also still missing many tools. Over these past 20 years of life, I've learned so much already and I feel like the many experiences I've experienced so far have taught me so much of what life is and yet I feel so naive. There's also this weird sense of loneliness, which could actually just be independence. You're thrown into these new "adulting" things/situations that you've never faced before and it feels so lonely sometimes, you're like, "well I've never done this before, it feels like I'm the only person in the world going through this, what am I even doing". But then you turn to your friends, and you realize, we're all going through this and even though we have to go through some things alone, you'll have your friends going through it as well, and that, in a way, is comforting. As I've turned 20, I've had so many doubts about what I'm doing with my life, and alongside that, a sense of regret for things I've done or have happened. And I'm now realizing, that thats what life is, thats what accumulating years of life means. You take wrong paths, you make mistakes along the way that you may lead you the wrong way or that you regret, but all you can do is learn, learn from these mistakes and just keep moving forward. So as I sit here and write this, I'm reminding myself of what being 20 has been like so far and reminding myself that although some of my feelings are contradicting, that thats okay. This is what growing up is like, it isn't linear, there isn't instructions, all you can really do is learn and move forward...

xoxo,

Radio Rebel