I just turned 22 and I hate hearing this. Yes I’ve had good moments in my 20s but it’s been a roller coaster. Your friendships change, you lose friends because you outgrow them, you have a friend who talks about the news/ politics all day. You don’t have the guts to tell them it’s annoying bc you understand why they would be obsessed but it gives you anxiety and drains you. Like please pick something else to talk about. Another one of your guy friends calls you “sensitive” because you’re tired of him making jokes 24/7 where he’s teasing you and he even swipes up on your insta story to neg you even more when you told him to stop.
Your friend texts you everyday and complains about their partner that they rushed a relationship with and now she’s forcing it to work bc understandable she’s having a child by him. Most people in their 20s are immature so usually dating becomes a mess and drama, you’re trying to figure out what you want to do in life, you’re broke, some are starting families so different life stages. How did you guys stay strong in your 20s when going through different periods of your life ? I’m most likely about to be friendless and finding new friends after graduating college.
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I’ve always disagreed with this sentiment. Your 20s are so messy because you’re figuring stuff out. IMO people really hit their stride in their 30s. If you work hard and do good financial planning in your 20s then your 30s is pretty much a cakewalk.
My 20’s sucked. I almost didn’t make it out alive. My 30’s were better and my 40’s are fabulous. Ignore anyone telling you when you should be happy and just live your life.
Remember this: any relationship, ANY relationship, be it romantic, platonic, professional or familial that is not serving you can end. If your friends are making you feel bad more than they make you feel good, you don’t have to be their friend. You can block them. And you would be surprised how much better you’ll feel if you remove people who make you feel bad on a regular basis from your life.
I found that life got significantly easier once I hit my 30s.
Everyone in their 20s is trying to find themselves and often it’s at the cost of others.
Work on yourself. Understand your likes and dislikes and learn how to set boundaries with yourself and others.
I promise stuff gets easier as you get older. You just need to hang in there!
I mean…spend your 20s sorting out your life, so you can live your mature 30s to the fullest. You’re still very very very young and your brain plays tons of tricks on you.
Yeah, 20’s are the chaotic experimental disasters. And that’s a good thing. Go out. Try things. Make reasonable mistakes. Figure out who you are. Thirties are the figure out the logistics decade. The 40’s is where it’s really at. It’s the “I have all the data now and I don’t give a fuck” decade. I’m 44 and it’s marvelous and much more peaceful.
Hi I’m not a woman, but at my college graduation party my grandmother took me aside and told me that I was about to go through a very hard time. Obviously I was like “?!?!?!”.
She was right though. The beginning of my 20s as a new adult was frequently difficult. When it was difficult I remembered her telling me that and took some comfort in the fact that it was expected.
Your early 20s can be hard. It’s also a time of freedom. It’s a time for trying things, deciding what path you want to go down. It’s a time for saying yes to everything. It also can be lonely, and confusing, and frustrating.
In my mid-20s I felt like I suddenly “woke up”. Like something in my brain changed and I realized I was looking at the world from a different place.
Keep going. Explore, try things. Give yourself the grace that you are undergoing a huge transition. Be nice to yourself. You will get through this. You will meet new friends and start a new phase of your life.
I’m sorry for intruding on this woman only space, but I found my grandmother’s warning/advice so helpful that I wanted to share it.
Mine were so painful and confusing. 30s were way better for me. Late 40s now, have had ups and downs but feel a lot more secure even in the bad times. It gets better!
You’re 22, so barely into it. Wait til you hit 28-29 and look back then. Huge difference between 28 and 22
early 20s are tumultuous, but nearing the end of my 20s, I find myself agreeing with the sentiment. you gotta do the work, though!!! which is still hard sometimes, even now.
I imagine it’s the same dickheads who insist your school days are the best days of your life (hearing that while I was suffering through my school days made me think “if this is the best my life gets then I’m not sure I want to stick around for the rest of it.”)
Personally, my 20s were much like my teenage years, only with less support because I was meant to be an adult. I had no idea what I wanted in life, what I was doing, or how to even understand myself, let alone other people. I had some fun times but also some very hard and lonely times, all accompanied by being crushingly poor and perpetually stressed about money.
My 30s were infinitely better than my 20s, and so far my 40s are better again. I hope it’ll be the same for you!
I will say, you just turned 22. Which means you’ve have seven years left in your twenties. There’s a lot of time for it to turn around. I’m 24, so barely older than you, and my experience at 20-21 is drastically different than my experience now.
I don’t know, maybe you’ll continue to have a shitty 20s, but don’t count them out just yet, you and I are still experiencing them
You couldn’t pay me to be in my 20s again. Believe me, 30s are where it’s at!
22yo here. I just remember my horrifying childhood. The violence, the threats, the inability to escape, because adults didn’t give a fuck in the first place…oh yeah.
It’s easy to be an adult, if you never got to be a child. Mostly because you can now be a child, by being an adult. The rest gets numbed, or you your brain devours any happy-memory comparision through dissociative amnesia, leading to no potential nostalgia.
So yeah. CPTSD is fun. And the people who say “Your 20s are the best time” are just the stupid evolution of “Your teens are the best time”. Neither is right. Just their privilige to be given an easier life
The 20s you might look hot, but your 30s are the best.
I felt this in my soul a bit. My twenties were absolutely nutso. Like I can’t explain all of it, it sounds ridiculous. I think people are saying you should be having fun at this point because you’re at your peak healthwise ( as long as you’re not sick or disabled of course) and you should take advantage of it.
But there’s money to consider. There’s trying to gain employment and housing. Then there’s still drama happening cos everyone is still young and irrational half the damn time.
I can’t tell you how to cope, because I didn’t. I was a hot mess. But I can tell you that hitting thirty felt weirdly good. I suddenly gained the ability to absolutely shut down fuckery, with no guilt. I started to feel like I’d wasted a lot of time being too scared to speak up to defend myself. I relied on getting high every day and I could barely eat. My meds were all fucked up for a while too, so I had that to handle too.
So maybe don’t do what I did? I’d say save every penny you can, shut down fuckery because in the long run it’s better for you, find somewhere to be that makes you feel safe, don’t waste your time on someone who doesn’t feel like you do. Don’t rely on drugs to cope with reality. Don’t neglect your health. That’s my advice I guess. Do the opposite of what I did.
So, I think it’s different for everyone. I’m 28 and I can’t wait for my 30s but I really enjoyed late to mid-20s.
You’re 22, your frontal lobe isn’t even fully developed yet. A lot is going to change and it’s going to be awesome! So, stay calm, don’t worry if your 20s are going to be the best decade of your life or sth. Just be and enjoy the process.
Hi I’m 25. It’s the “best” because some disposable income + few responsibilities. But these days the disposable income is probably less and less.
I’m embracing the chaos. I have no idea what I’m doing and maybe if I do enough things, by the time I’m in my 30s, I’ll have a better idea of where I want my life to go.
And I was someone who had every step planned. I just didn’t realize that after I “won” consumerism by becoming an office drone that I’d have a crisis of self because… that’s it, for the next few decades? Sitting in an office and figuring out how to awkwardly leave cocktail parties early?
Your 20s suck. But you dont really see it til you hit your 30s. Technically you are still growing into being an adult in your 20s. Learning your path, your likes & dislikes, how to handle relationships not just romantic ones. It’s a chaotic time.
So you’re only 2 years into your 20s and already wrote off the entire decade as a failure? Sis this is most certainly a YOU problem if that is your attitude. Life is only what you make it, karmic retribution is real and if you’re feeding into the negativity in any capacity it will keep finding you.
I think older people who say this kind of peaked then. There’s a lot of good – don’t misunderstand me, but yes, a lot of suck and stress. The good: your body is probably at its peak. You look good, feel better than you will later. You have new independence and get to experiment.
The bad: you have to experiment or worse, take advice and trust that it’s okay for you. People remind you that you aren’t fully mature. You’re just old enough for people to take advantage of, and not always able to notice when it’s happening. Or you have no real other options than to let this job suck you dry because it beats homelessness. People think you should be further along in starting your life than you are, or at least you think do. Maybe nobody says it but you feel it.
My 30s were much better, despite having to start over: divorce, moving home, bankruptcy, back to college. I went into my 40s restructured and beginning to succeed, but with my body in rough shape due to neglect for 20 years. Forties were a mixed bag because of some things that happened. My 50s so far are great aside from the cancer. I’m taking care of myself, doing well financially, finally rebuilding friend circles I have been lacking.
If you want some advice: appreciate what’s good now. Invest time in your health, your friendships separate from your “social network”, your career, and your mental health. Every little bit helps, even if it’s an hour a week. There will be bad things and stress along the way, and there will be times you can’t invest in these things. The work you do will help to minimize the recovery time from those periods. And you will see that there is a lot of good times to come. This isn’t your peak; this is a short plateau and there’s a lot of fun ahead!
I’m 40 now and 30s were the best. But also the most precarious bc all of the misogynistic expectations get so loud and can lead you to making bad decisions.
The best thing you can do is learn to tune out society and do what works for you
My twenties was the worst decade of my life, but it also made me the person I am today at 37. There are things I wish I didn’t do and things I wish hadn’t happened to me, but I did them and they happened and the only thing to do is just keep going. There were times when I didn’t want to keep going, but I did, crying and screaming and throwing up the whole time.
I never felt “strong” in the moment for enduring the things I went through, just exhausted and depressed and humiliated and anxious and fed up. Now that I’m well past those events and have processed them pretty thoroughly, I can look back at myself with kindness and grace and see that I was being strong, I just didn’t know what that meant for me as a person, or what it felt like.
I lost every single friend, except 1, that I had after I outed the guy who abused me to my community. Overnight, every single person stopped talking to me, including people I considered as close as family. It was the single most painful experience of my entire life; way way worse than being abused was realizing that NONE of the people I thought cared about me did, at all, even a little. Not in any way that actually mattered.
I struggled for many years with the emotional aftermath of that, but I came out the other side almost completely different. I’m ruthless about friendships now. I learned to protect myself first because there’s no one else in the world who cares about me like I do. I learned that it’s not selfish to put yourself first – it’s self preservation.
My 20s were meh, but my 30s were so much fun. I wish I could go back to my 30s.
I remained in one continuous, life-ruining mental health crisis for the next twenty years. I’m still in it.
How did I get through it? The clock just keeps ticking. That’s literally all there is to it.