Why Being A Woman In Your 20s Is The Worst

Your 20s are simply the worst. Don’t try to deny it.

A decade of change, whether you choose to admit it or not. You can legally drink. You get off your parent’s health insurance. You (likely) graduate college. You have sex. A lot of sex. You party, even if you try to deny it. You know you do.

Shots. Drugs. Maybe, once in awhile, something harder than weed. A series of one-night-stands and transient girlfriends. Or possibly a long-term relationship. Perhaps your high school sweetheart, the two you next to each other in your senior yearbook, embraced in one of those awkward poses that force you both to stare at the camera.

Then you pass the 21-year-old threshold, and you’re inundated with family, aunts, cousins, friends already settled down. Where’s the ring? When you get to say yes to the dress? When you do you think you’d plan to get pregnant?

What if you’re just not ready? What if you’re still stuck in school, having to take fewer credits to carry a job? What if you’re in a new relationship? What if you just find yourself unable to work, to product, to create?

Why do women deal with this? I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel as though I have a ticking time bomb, mostly likely embedded in my uterus, telling me I have only so much time to be a real woman. As though, because I’m divorced, I’m less of what I should be. I failed, yes. More than once in two years. It’s true. But I’m much stronger from it.

When you’re in your 20s, your friendships fall into two categories. You have your solid, lifetime friends. The ones who, despite what mental or physical distance that may have accrued, are always by your side. And you have friends who were around during the good times, the crazy times, when freedom from responsibility reigned. I can assure you, those friends will not last until you’re 30. One or both of you will move into entirely different lifestyles. There may be resentment on either end.

The millennials are an odd generation. We were funded by the post-Baby Boomer generation, those easing into Generation X. We’re an easy generation to pick on. Everyone is a special snowflake, know? Participation trophies for all, yo.

But we’re still in our 20s. We’re still post-high school, post-college, introduced to a completely new world that doesn’t revolve around higher education. We aren’t your case study about future old maids. We’re not getting married at 22 to secure a future. We are a generation fused with so much our past, the good and bad and happy and sad aspects. We are doing nothing more than learning.

But, regardless of having to stay strong, your 20s are the worst. It’s science.