Time-Squiggle: Rethinking the Timeline
Looking back at my 20s from the other side of 30
Oh, the roaring 20s: what a time to dream big and explore. What a time to be alive. What a time to be delusional. Here I was at 28 with an unused rolling gym membership, pizza boxes doubling as coasters, 150 abandoned hobbies, and a side hustle that took hustle’s side, not mine.
Was that what I told my preschool teacher I wanted to be when I grew up? I want to be an eternal student with insomnia and debt? I know my memory isn’t what it used to be, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what I said. She would’ve responded.
Our 20s are glorified, put on a pedestal. Directly or indirectly, we’re told that this is the time to live — your one and only shot at being young and carefree, yet also your one and only shot at building your future. So much weight is put on this decade of our lives, and so much idolization. You hear all sorts of trite philosophies during this time: “You’re only young once,” “Work now so your older self can rest” and a long list of other contradictory ideologies. All in all they make you feel like you’re not doing it right no matter how you’re doing it.
So we plan. We start planning as soon as we’re off the playground. What subjects do I take in school? What extracurriculars will make me stand out in my future career? Where do I want to live? What age do I want to get married? And it’s almost always a very linear, very inflexible plan. We’re told this is how it’s meant to be, so surely this is how it will be, right? I would say “wrong,” but it feels somewhat redundant.
Your mid-20s hit and then your life starts to look like a brutal series of “expectation vs reality” memes, specifically made to roast you. Maybe your career ends up feeling like a stop-start traffic jam. Maybe you get the exact career you wanted, but it’s nothing like you expected. Maybe love doesn’t find you as easily as you hoped. Maybe you find your person at a young age, but struggle to untangle your identity from the relationship. Maybe you get everything you’ve ever wanted in life and yet still feel unfulfilled.
My own 20s were riddled with detours and reality checks. I wish I could say I took it in stride. I didn’t. I moped and I complained every chance I got, to anyone who would listen. My 20-year-old self thought I would breeze through university, meet the love of my life there, then find my feet in my career, marry the love of my life, have children, and somehow find the perfect balance between being a professional woman and a mother.
Yet the reality was, even at 29, I was unfulfilled in my career, struggling to find basic work-life balance (even sans children), and checking my crush’s Instagram account for signs that he’s still single and, ideally, secretly in love with me. Then it hit me; I am a full-grown adult. An adult that children may look at the way I looked at adults when I was younger, thinking they had life figured out. I started to wonder if they all felt like this at this age. Even now, when I admire seemingly more accomplished people than me, maybe they also still feel like a child trying to navigate an adult life.
This wasn’t in the adulthood manual, was it? It sure wasn’t in my copy.
Yet, despite all the expectations put on us, we’re still told we need to roll with the punches: “Don’t dwell; don’t worry; be resilient; don’t stress; not everything is within our control.” But the thing is, that’s entirely what we’ve been taught: follow this linear, societally predetermined path, and you will succeed. If you don’t succeed, you didn’t follow it right. So really, what’s the takeaway message there? That it’s all within your control. So if you deviate from this path, you end up either feeling like a victim of circumstance or whipping yourself with the I-should’ve-done-better belt.
Isn’t this yet another expectation, though? That you shouldn’t dwell on life not going your way? Isn’t this yet another responsibility you’re meant to carry, and if you do dwell, again, you’re doing it wrong?
But how can I not dwell? How can I not sit and grieve the life I dreamed of having, all up until this moment? All the hope that I had, even when things were tough, that at some point life would magically turn around and give us the exact timeline I always wanted, or at the very least, some incredible consolation prize for my patience.
So I stopped. I took a breather and held a wake for that imagined life. I pack up my beautiful and naive childhood drawings of the future and reminisced on a life I never had. Then, as I inched closer to this imaginary deadline, the big 3 – 0, I started to accept that the rat race is coming to an end – or at the very least, changing – whether I like it or not.
I started to re-evaluate. What nobody tells you is that the minute you hit this deadline, this big weight of expectations lifts off your shoulders. I didn’t know it was happening at the time, but I realized in the following year that I felt so much lighter.
Society has all but told me that I’m irrelevant past my 20s. And as terrifying as that thought was to my younger self, it has been incredibly liberating to my more mature counterpart. It gave me the license to listen to myself — truly and intently — and figure out what works for me. What it is I want to be when I grow up? And I could answer completely outside of what is expected of me.
I noticed the shift in my timeline. The slow movement away from the pretty straight lines in colored pens, with carefully glued on Pinterest vision board items. I watched it branch into a tree diagram of ifs and whens, tangled with unexpected detours. Some I worked around and some caused me to jump back a step, or two. Others unexpectedly decorated my life in ways I never imagined.
What’s a pre-traced straight line compared to this unique masterpiece that’s entirely mine? Like any form of art, its beauty lies in the soul, the experimentation, and the imperfections that make it one-of-a-kind. Now that I’m on the other side of the 3 – 0, I’m starting to think that maybe it’s time to toss out that old timeline and get comfortable with the squiggle. Take it from someone whose timeline looks less like a well-drawn map and more like a toddler let loose with a box of crayons. I’m starting to feel okay with it — and at least it’s colorful.
