It’s become a kind of truism in our society that your twenties are your selfish years; you’re supposed to be wild and crazy; you’ll never be this young again.

And it’s true. We never will be this young again, unless you believe in reincarnation, or the government is hiding something from us, or that crazy guy on the corner has finally finished his time machine. We have opportunities during these years that will be much harder to come by once real life finally sinks its talons in. Our twenties are the years during which society expects us to screw up, and therefore, are the years that it becomes acceptable for us to screw up. We’re supposed to be living in the moment, having new experiences, traversing the globe and letting life take us where it may.

We’re also supposed to be choosing our careers and establishing the plan for what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Uh, what?

See, the problem with these expectations of your twenties being sun-drenched years bathed in excitement and wonder is that it’s only half-realistic. Sure, you’ll probably travel and party and do crazy things with your appearance, and you’ll make lifelong friends along the way. Some days, your life really will look like an episode of "Skins"… whether that’s an accomplishment or not is up to your discretion. Some days you’ll wish would last forever. Some days, you really will feel boundless.

And some days, you’ll be at your work-study job stuffing envelopes for three hours straight.

Because, unfortunately, real life is not the TV shows you binge watch of a 30-something playing a 20-something working at some supermarket yet somehow still affording an NYC apartment with a view, no roommates and a super cute doorman. If that was real life, you wouldn’t have to watch it on Netflix because you’d be living it and the super cute doorman would be named Hans and he’d text you heart-eye emojis and pictures of cats. Real life is rarely, if ever, like that. God, do I wish real life was like that.

But that doesn’t mean that these aren’t valuable years. Regardless of what your resident existentialist (hi, that’s me) would like to tell you, life really isn’t all that short. It’s literally the longest thing that will ever happen to you (except for oblivion and the terrifying reality of death, but more on that later. In my diary.)

What I mean to say is, we really do have our whole lives ahead of us. That’s a whole lot of time for making mistakes and trying on different personas and testing all the waters we can dip our little feet into, before we decide where we want to plunge in. And that’s a whole lot of time for sludging through college, doing the busy work, and staring at the ceiling wondering when your real life will begin.

My favorite teacher used to tell us that there isn’t some grand schedule in the sky; we don’t have to follow set guidelines of when we are “supposed to” accomplish something or how long the process should take us. Those guidelines don’t exist. Your timeline is just that -- your timeline. You’ll get there when you get there, and if you get there and decide you don’t like there -- well, you can always set your course for somewhere else.

So your twenties might be your selfish years. They might be your wild years. But unless you’re living inside of a Netflix Original, they’re not going to be that way all the time. And they won’t be stuffing envelopes all the time, either (although if you keep track of how many hours you spend doing that, you’ll probably cry.) The fact is that there is no one way your twenties are “supposed” to be, and trying to live by some ridiculous text post you saw on Tumblr probably isn’t going to make you very happy.