Dear 20-year-old me,
You are going to spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering whether you are doing your twenties correctly.
You will look around a lecture theatre and convince yourself that everyone else has figured it out. Someone has already secured an internship. Someone is running a society. Someone has posted another “I’m delighted to announce” post on LinkedIn. Someone seems to have found the love of their life somewhere between first year and a 9 am seminar.
Meanwhile, you are still figuring out what you want to do with your life.
Welcome to your twenties.
When you first arrived at university, you thought that by twenty you would feel like an adult. Instead, you will still call home with questions you could probably Google. You will still need your friends to tell you whether sending that text is a terrible idea. You will still buy groceries with ambitious plans to cook, only to end up eating something questionable at 11 pm.
But somewhere between all of that, you are growing up.
University has a funny way of making life feel like a race.
Grades are numbers. Internships have company names attached to them. Society positions become CV bullet points. Achievements become LinkedIn announcements. Even happiness can start looking measurable when everyone else’s best moments are arranged neatly across a screen.
Please stop checking whether you’re ahead.
Your life will rarely look impressive while you’re actually living it.
Remember, sometimes progress is just surviving that exhausting week or saying no, which are small achievements that truly matter.
They all count.
And while you’re busy worrying about the future, don’t accidentally miss the life happening around you.
Go to the spontaneous dinner. Take the train to somewhere new. Stay in the kitchen talking until 2 am. Go to the society event where you barely know anyone. Occasionally, spend £4 on the coffee you absolutely could have made at home.
The deadline will be submitted. The reading will eventually get done. There will always be another application to write and another thing to add to your CV. There will not always be another Wednesday night at university with exactly these people because some of them won’t stay.
At twenty, you might believe permanence is the only proof that something mattered. It isn’t. A friendship ending doesn’t erase the nights you couldn’t stop laughing. A relationship that doesn’t last forever doesn’t make the love imaginary. Some people can belong completely to one chapter of your life without appearing in the next.
Let them.
Could you take pictures of the ordinary things, too? Your friends sitting on the kitchen floor. The library table covered in coffee cups. Manchester on a random rainy afternoon. The walk to campus you’ve done a hundred times. You think you’ll remember everything.
You won’t.
And to the eighteen-year-old picking this up, wondering what the next few years are supposed to look like: don’t worry too much about becoming the person you imagined you’d be by twenty.
You will change your mind. You will meet people you can’t imagine your life without and lose people you thought would always be there. You’ll discover things you are good at, things you definitely aren’t, and things you never expected to care about.
You don’t need to have university figured out this week.
You don’t even need to have it figured out by twenty.
So, apply for the thing. Wear the outfit. Call your parents. Tell your friends you love them. Take the stupid picture. Say yes to the plan.
You are not behind.
You’re just becoming someone you haven’t met yet.
Love,
Your 20-something alleged adult
