In Jennifer Garner's movie, "Thirteen Going on Thirty," her transformation-inducing phrase is, (and I'm paraphrasing), "I want to be thirty, flirty, and thriving." T
hat's great for a thirteen-year-old to think that...but what about your twenties? I am twenty-two, and I'll turn twenty-three in a little over a month; I'd love to enjoy being twenty-three and not worrying about my thirties just yet.
I'm just now starting to get a sense of who I am as a person, and how I see myself. I've got plenty of time left to worry about being "flirty and thriving," and so do you.
If you're reading this article and you're just turning twenty or twenty-one, you're probably just starting to figure out who you are in the world, and how to make sense of all the absolute craziness that is adulthood. That's okay. This big societal rule that tries to tell us that by a certain age we're supposed to have our lives carved out and our "mission statement" etched into who we are is complete bullshit.
Life is all about the process. It is a constant learning process and it's okay not to have all of the answers.
Of course, practical things like your career choice and figuring out how you're going to pay your bills or afford insurance are things that definitely have age markers associated with them, but everything else is up to you.
You get to take time to decide exactly how you will define yourself. That is within your power, and it's nobody else's right to decide for you.
So, I'm going to be completely and unabashedly myself, and figure out what that means to me. I'm going to spend my twenties falling in and out of love so many times until I find the right person. I'm going to spend some nights out later than I should, I'm going to take road trips with some of my best friends, and I'm going to dare to do many other things that I thought were never possible.
The art of finding yourself lies in experience. My twenties will absolutely continue to be my selfish years, and I refuse to apologize for that. You shouldn't apologize for taking the time to find out who you are, either.