Twenty Things I Learned in My Twenties

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr

So, I turn thirty tomorrow. I’m fine about it. I said I’m fine!  Do I not seem fine? I am totally fine, ha ha! See, I’m even laughing, but not too intensely or anything. I’m still full of joie de vivre, vim and vigor, piss and vinegar. I don’t know why you’re making it such a big deal, god, it’s just a stupid birthday, it’s not like I’m worried about getting older, or dying. We’re all getting older, all the time. I’m young at heart, right? And I still look pretty young, right? Right?! Not that I need you to tell me I look young. Looks fade, but personality is forever. Or personality is a diamond in the bush, or whatever. You know what I mean. I get tired after lunch. I get disoriented in seasonal transitions. The heat in this building dries out my eyeballs and makes everything look harrowing. Can we talk about something else?

Really, I think I’m pretty cool with turning thirty. Of course I’ve got my little hang-ups. Last weekend I swore I found the first wiry gray thread sprouting out of my side part, but my sister certified it as a blond highlight. This morning I found another one, but when I scrutinized it I realized I’d just gotten some Eucerin in my hair. And I worry about life being short with all the various things left to do, I worry about time being cruel in its bendiness (if I concentrate I can remember exactly what my favorite pair of sailor jeans felt like when I was 15, but WOW that was half my lifetime ago, and I was this whole other human being then). But I like my life now better than I used to, so getting older seems okay.

My sister says the thirties are better. When I asked why she said, “For the same reason your late twenties are better than the early twenties.” I get that. You know what you want, you know more all around, so you feel less angsty and fraudulent. Everything’s easier.

In the past few weeks I’ve been in the strange position of having three lovely female students come to me for post-grad life advice. This has never happened to me before. Maybe it’s my two pseudo-gray hairs? Maybe they like my stuff on True/Slant (if so, Hi guys!!)? I tried to sort of talk them out of taking any advice from me, since I basically feel like my life has been a herky-jerky series of applications I filled out in fits of panic, lucky breaks, calamities I repurposed as motivation, and serendipitous meetings, all harassed into something like forward motion by bulldog determination and a (sometimes strained) sense of humor. Somehow, my little path has worked out so far, but that doesn’t make it teachable. Still, I’ve found in these meetings with students that there are some navigating-the-road-of-life type ideas I gouged out in the last decade.

Herewith, twenty things I learned in my twenties. Caveat: this is necessarily sort of a bourgie list, because, I guess, I’m kind of a bourgie girl.

1. Stay in your lane.

All three of the students who came to speak with me were fretting about falling behind their friends. One girl, eyes Keane-wide and sad, told me her roommate was applying for thirty law schools.

Obsessively comparing yourself to other people seems like a guaranteed recipe for anxiety and self-loathing, and I basically think it’s true that the only person who cares how you stack up to people you know is you. Besides–whatever inspiration a competitive spirit imparts seems totally corrupt: you’re appropriating someone else’s priorities when you should just be trying to make the best, like, Fimo diorama of “The Tempest” you can possibly make, if that’s what you’re into.

2. Oftentimes you’re the thing preventing you from getting what you want.

I don’t mean this in the Rhonda-Byrne law-of-attraction sense, the if-you-seek-it, they-will-come sense, but in the sense that we often take ourselves out of the running before anyone else has a chance to do so, because we doubt ourselves or because we’re afraid to take risks. One of my students told me another professor of hers said she shouldn’t bother applying for a grad program she was really interested in. That is crazy talk! Crazy. Talk. I told her my mother once told me that she realized mid-career that most of the people who were higher up than she was weren’t any smarter or any harder-working, they just didn’t doubt themselves and they asked for what they wanted. Lots of other factors weigh in on the outcome, of course, but the confidence bump sure helps.

3. Listen to your mother. Or if it really seems like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, listen to mine.

4. Wallow not.

Ugh, the time I’ve wasted pitying myself after failure, rejection, the end of a relationship; abusing Leonard Cohen, cheap Shiraz, the ears of friends; feeling Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” a little too hard; hitting refresh on email, hoping for a different result. Lick wounds, indulge some perseverating, rhetorical “But why?”s, accept you may never know, put it in a locked box, kick it into outer space, and move on.

5. Related: If you don’t like it, you can leave.

An unhappy relationship, a stupid movie, a boring concert, a crappy spin class. Life is so, so short. Which is another thing I learned in this kind of beam of light, revelatory way in my twenties, but it seems too cliched to list.

6. Unless you really can’t, in which case, try to look for the fun in it.

7. Talk to everybody, and be kind.

That’s usually where the fun is, in talking. I still get really bad social anxiety in situations where I don’t know anyone, and I sometimes end up stress-eating Tostitos and like pretending to be super busy rooting around in my purse, but I find talking to people–at parties, in long lines, in crowds–makes everything fun and bearable, and reminds you of the moving, webby connectivity of humankind.

And when I say kind, I don’t mean nice. Nice can be brittle. My friend has this syrupy impression of nice customers who used to verbal-tip her at her restaurant job: “Thank yeeeeewwww.” By kind I mean, I think, respecting that everybody’s got it a little hard.

8. Be brave enough to say the hard things. Especially Thank you and I’m sorry.

Life is short, etc etc.

9. Lemon takes the garlic smell off skin, and peaches should never be refrigerated.

10. Let go of grudges.

Life is way, way easier without a knot of resentment at the base of your skull.

11. When you listen, try to let go of what you’re going to say next. Just listen.

In my blood I am an interrupter. Conversation sometimes makes me a little overeager, and I use a little internal Opus Dei flail to get myself to shut up and pay attention.

12. Wear shoes you can walk in.

When you don’t, somehow you always end up walking. Hot shoes don’t look so hot when you have to walk like a freshly whelped calf.

13. Keep an open mind.

About everything: new people, politics, ideas, travel, food, clothes, music, sex, high art, low art, etc. A friend of mine–who kicked me out of her Dawson’s Creek party in college for making fun of Joshua Jackson’s SAT-flash-card vocabulary–took me to see a Twilight double feature last night, a little fearful that I’d make fun of it. And guess what? I enjoy romance porn now that I can shut off my irreverence long enough to let it work its sparkly vampire magic. R. Pattinson, you only need ask.

14. Be careful with credit cards.

Not only because of devious practices of CC companies, but also because using them is a slippery slope. Paying a bill with a card suddenly makes it easier to use, and then you’re using it in a pinch to get groceries, and a metro card, and then lunch and a new book, and then a birthday present and underwear and a manicure, and–whoops, debt. Subsidiary to this point are a few temporary hard-times fixes that helped me: ramen-with-an-egg stirred in makes a cheap, filling meal; selling clothes can turn up instant pocket money (CDs too if you’re an analog person like me); Craigslist jobs and waiting tables can help when you need work and dough right away.

15. Don’t be afraid to be weird.

Not in like a cultivated way, but just in a way where you’re honest about the specific stuff you’re into.

16. Work is a relationship.

In that you spend gobs of time with it, and it gives back in proportion to what you give it. Choose wisely and work hard.

17. Classical music: pretty awesome.

I discovered this during a wallowing period, when, hoping for a suitably epic soundtrack for my melancholy, I Googled “dark strings classical morose” and ended up being slightly transformed and elevated by Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.

I still hate jazz, though.

18. Speak carefully.

When I started teaching again last year I felt a little panicked that students were writing down the crap I said in their notebooks. These are just, like, my ideas! I wanted to say. I probably won’t even have the same ones tomorrow! Once a student informed me that I’d approved her classmate’s suggestion that repetition was a feature of bad writing one week before intoning that patterning and repetition are some of the greatest pleasures of literature. I guess I’d assumed that people were only listening to like ten percent of what I said. Now I try to speak precisely, and mean what I say, because people are listening more often than I think.

19. Don’t dye your hair.

People always told me this, and I didn’t listen! I had sun-lightened blond hair when I was young, and when I cut it all off it grew back brown. So I started dying it. And now I’m in the vaguely humiliating position of bringing my hair person a water-damaged photograph taken when I was nineteen in an effort to get back to where I was. Avoid.

20. Time speeds up as you get older.

So, like, be aware of that.

And now, I’m off to wear my last midriff tops and make my last irresponsible decisions. While I’m gone, YOU out there! Tell me, what did you learn in your twenties? Or thirties?