By Sanjana Rao

I think we’re all writing an imaginary book in our minds about our lives. It only starts to take shape in your 20s, which becomes the foreword. This is the page where you’re reborn. Little by little, every day, you’re changing, you’re waking up as someone slightly new. An intriguing feeling to wake up not wanting to, but needing to rewrite the way you’re interpreting the sound of your thoughts and how they dictate your experiences. This decade of your life is all about coming into your own by becoming undone; it is about coming alive.  

Every quarter-life crisis begins when you stop wanting everything you had. You’re unmoored from the person you were at 18. You could spend your time ruminating, “Why don’t I want the same things I did when I was 18?” The answer is, just because. We know what a "teenage dream" looks like, living as though the world is waiting for you to arrive. But no one tells you what the '20s dream' is supposed to look like. Perhaps that's because it's not a dream, but rather a reconstruction. It's about wanting something so badly, getting it, and still feeling empty. I wish there were more depth to it, but that's how growth works. Desires evolve, and values expire.  

The old question, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” has quietly shifted into a more uncertain one: “What kind of person are you even capable of being?” because the truth is, you don't want to be you. You want to be a mosaic of everyone else. You’ll borrow personalities, ambitions, and aesthetics, wishing for the attitude, or a job or a paycheck, or a holiday in Europe, the impossibly curated closet of someone that makes you want to burn yours to the ground. It is an inevitable function that your brain will develop, to start measuring your own life in fractions of everyone else’s.  

Somewhere in that quiet upheaval, you begin again.  

One Saturday night not long ago, I witnessed people my age stumble out of bars and into kebab shops, cheeks red, arms intertwined; here, the binding agent was free will. On the ride home, I kept seeing it, faces in bar windows, heads thrown back in conversation, pint glasses fogged up with condensation and laughter catching on itself. And I could feel myself haunted by the fear of future regret.  

This decade can feel like a countdown disguised as freedom. Maybe it was all the 2010 party anthems we grew up on. I’m looking at you, ‘We Are Young’ and ‘I Gotta Feeling’. Countless lyrics tell us these were the years to be reckless and radiant. 

I was scared to disappoint this version of myself ten years from now, who’d look back and wonder why I didn’t say ‘yes’ more, why I didn’t make this specific kind of memory that will live loud in my mind. It's about the night I didn't choose the chaos, the ones that never even got a chance to become stories.  

This decade will require you to lean into doing things for the sake of the plot. For me, that began with walking out of a seven-year-long friendship with three people I couldn’t imagine living without. I went from imagining them breaking it down on the dancefloor at my wedding to realising, mid-conversation, that the banter had become old. Too far gone for resuscitation. This made me question whether what we had was ever love or just habituation. Was I just fulfilling an attendance requirement all these years? 

I resorted to revisionist history to feed the grudge, this break-up had left in me. For months, shifting between feelings of “I’m over it” to being back to square one, filled with shame of wanting to reach across the sea I put between us. This loss did make me look inward; some nights I wondered long and hard about whether I was doomed to be devoid of company.  

As Neruda said, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”. 

In hindsight, isn’t that how it always goes? I never learnt the distinction between love and blind devotion, and this decade is going to teach me how to deprogram that teaching, one way or another.  

The truth is, in my 20s, I forgot how to let people in. I forgot what it’s like to get to know someone from scratch. I only have a surface-level understanding of what kind of connections I want to make. But the enchanting part about this decade is finding people who’ll fit right into this important phase, whether that's forever or not. But hey, I’ll always keep the memories  

Sometimes, the plot demands you leave everything behind and run away. Even if it's something as cinematic as getting on an international flight all alone, fighting back tears as you leave behind everything you’ve known. I left behind my parents, who show me love in ways I won’t always understand, ties with relatives bound more by blood than warmth, and the friends who feel like family. As you’re flying halfway across the world to a country where you don't know a single soul, you’ll know this is what it looks like to take a risk, ‘for the plot, ’ and it’s only the beginning.  

In a nutshell, your 20s are marked by self-awareness that is both ironic and lacking in clarity. It is recognising, with brutal honesty, that you’re lost and you’re learning out loud. The colours you have to paint this decade are scarlet, from the quiet rage of feeling like you’re falling behind, green, from the envy of watching others reach milestones you thought would be yours by now and blue, from the grief of feeling that you were once singular, precious, set apart. Now your dreams resemble just about anyone's.  

You’ve become acquainted with the new ‘you’ and are unsure whether you’ll get along. But maybe that's the whole point of your 20s. Granting yourself the grace to empathise with this flighty version of yourself.