Warning: this blog post contains explicit material.
This is kind of a follow-up post to “I’m just a kid“. My problem is I expected my 20’s to be the best years of my life. I wanted my 20’s to be my “fun years”. I felt like I never really got “fun years” because I was too busy slaving over school so I wouldn’t be homeless and die after I graduated, and busy stretching myself thin doing whatever everyone else like my family and peers wanted so they would shut the hell up and stop criticizing me.
I wanted my 20’s to be when I could be unapologetically myself without judgement or fear of, work a bullshit job, have my own living space, have fun and pursue my dreams. Now my 20’s are all but over. Did they meet my expectation? Not even close. Instead of doing all the above-mentioned things, I spent my 20’s living in fear that one little slip would mean certain doom for me and compulsively rebelling against my employers, my parents, and anyone who tried to tell me what to do or how to live my life.
I was right about one thing: I needed to do what made me happy and no one else. Only problem is I didn’t know how. I never learned how because I felt constantly bullied my whole life by my parents, my peers, and Chuck, the asshole that lives in my head manifesting in the form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
I feel like going through a “rebellious“ phase is normal, healthy even, but most people go through it in their teens. I never did other than wearing black tee shirts of heavy bands I liked, listening to heavy music, and growing my hair long and bleaching it. I was rebellious in the sense that I was artistic, progressive, optimistic, idealistic, and even perfectionistic.
I loved those things about myself, still do, and hope to be until I die. However, I was never destructive, like many kids in their teens and how I was in my 20’s. It’s tragic, yet normal, I feel.
My 20’s COULD have been the years I always wanted, but they weren’t because I drove myself insane. Why “insane“ you ask? Because Einstein defined “insanity“ as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different outcomes. I thought things would get better with age. Why would that be the case? Age means nothing if you keep doing the same thing over and over. I could have started having fun a long time ago, but I chose not to because I was scared.
I never had big expectations for my 30’s. I was raised to believe life is all downhill after you turn 30. 30 is when you give up your dreams, get a real job, get married, buy that white-picket fence house in the suburbs, have kids and slowly wait to die and be forgotten. I know this sounds very black-and-white. Maybe it is. Strange thing is though, I’m surprisingly excited for my 30’s.
I’m an ADULT adult now. My dreams are dead and I have nothing left to look forward to. I have nothing left to strive for. I have nothing left to lose. I have nothing left to care about. That may sound depressing as fuck, but it’s actually kind of freeing.
If I have nothing lose, care about, be afraid of, or look forward to then what’s to stop me from doing whatever the fuck I want?! Welcome to the best years of my life, free from care and fear. Population: me!
This may sound like a weird, even dangerous way of thinking. However, I feel like all adults secretly think this way, I’m just saying it. I feel most people reach this mentality until around their early or mid 20’s. I just got there a few years later in true late-bloomer fashion.
When I think of growing up, the song “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie comes to mind. I remember listening to this song during the summer of 2006, driving with the top down in my mom’s mustang. It’s a bit of a sad song. It‘a about going your own way to solve some personal problems. The line “it’s time to be a big girl now, and big girls don’t cry” really resonates with me in this situation.
I love doing gender-benders, but sometimes I have to make minimal changes to them to put things int my perspective, hence the title and lyric change...
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