"Cause I’m just about to set fire to everything I see"
May 19, 2010 § 1 Comment
Apparently, 25 is when it all clicks. 25 is when you start getting serious about getting serious. 25 is when the mother of all ice-breakers, “what school did/do you go to?” gets replaced by “where do you work?” 25 is when you start seeing the people you date as a potential spouse(s) (or in some cases, 25 is when you start considering if you want a spouse(s) at all). 25 is when you realize you can no longer eat four, palm-sized sugar cookies with frosting for breakfast without feeling really lousy later. 25 is when you don’t know whether to be offended or flattered when the waiter doesn’t ask you for your ID when you order pinot noir at dinner. 25 is when you start investing more (interpret that however you may), when you really start to understand quality over quantity in every aspect of your life, from furniture to friendships.
There’s an unmistakable sense of maturity and change that you notice in yourself as you hit your mid-twenties. They are subtle and hardly noticeable at first, but when you take a step back to evaluate yourself as a whole, you realize the sudden impact of it all. For a select few, these changes can happen earlier, but for the bulk of my friends and for me, it happened in the last year. Suddenly, it seemed, we weren’t kids anymore. We were no longer recent college graduates. For most of us, a few summers had passed since we could claim that title. We found our schedules a little fuller, a little less flexible. But it’s not the addition of a salaried job or the business-casual wardrobe I’m speaking of.
And I don’t know, maybe it’s because the mid-twenties seems a lot closer to thirty than it is to twenty. Maybe there really is a biological clock inside of us, alarms set on the points in our lives where significant change and growth is supposed to happen. Or maybe, you just get sick of acting like an idiot, outgrowing the days when being careless had consequences that didn’t seem so severe. Whatever it is, you start to understand yourself a little more, even when all you understand is that it only gets more confusing.
At 25, I can tell you all this was true for me. Everything came together. And everything fell apart.
At 25, I decided that a career and life plan twenty years in the making was no longer appropriate, as the passion I once felt for it had dissipated. But even with such a jarring decision, a decision that was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to come to terms with, I have never felt surer that I am doing the right thing.
I’m ashamed to say that I can be quite the ageist. I have always thought there was an age limit to certain things, and outside that range, it would no longer be acceptable or appropriate. And no, I’m not just talking about grandmothers in tube tops and hot pants (no? is that just Florida then?). Whenever I heard people say, “you’re never too old for…” I just pretentiously deemed them as people who couldn’t come to terms that a dream was over, or that a goal was just too unrealistic and out of reach. But when my own plans were delayed, I saw my previous mindset as being a little too skewed, and a little too naïve. Life, as we all can attest to, rarely ever goes according to schedule. We can make a basic itinerary and try to follow it as devoutly as we can, but more often than not, we find ourselves compromising, altering, and adjusting with each reroute we come across.
But 25 doesn’t have to mean anything more than what it is, a number; a product of some math problems, the minimum requirement to rent a car without incurring a ridiculous additional fee, the number of minutes on a treadmill you will negotiate as being sufficient enough to counterbalance the half a pizza you ate the night before.
In a lot of ways, we’re better prepared to take riskier chances at this age than we might have been five years ago. We’re a little more wiser and not as reckless, but not old enough to have become too jaded or discouraged. Even if we’re diving into something unfamiliar, we’re still guided by the experiences we’ve already recorded. We’ve become smarter about what we hold on to, and what can let go. We’re still molding. And we’re not ready to let go of all the ideals that brought us to where we are.
I think the biggest thing you understand at this age is that the life you have is truly yours to own. That no matter the obligations, the pressures, the expectations placed on you (by others and/or yourself), you are ultimately responsible for the choices you make because you have made them. You hit a certain point where you accept that there are no other bodies you can blame because you are indeed, accountable for your happiness.
25 doesn’t have to be the age where all your shit comes together. Neither does 26. Or 36. Risk something. Risk everything. You never stop figuring out who you are. So take your chances in San Francisco. Or Waco. Or NYC. Or a shack in West India. Do it while you have room for mistakes. Do it while your ass hasn’t started sagging. Time will be less and less forgiving as you get older, and that’s just the nature of life. And while there’s no age cap for self-discovery, it will get harder to take that step.
Life refuses to slow down for any of us, so do what you can when you can. And maybe that means moving to a different city in a different state. Or a different country on a different continent. Maybe it means switching jobs or switching industries. Maybe it means throwing out that lifelong game plan, to try out for something new. I don’t know. But at the end of your life, don’t you want to be able to have stories to tell? Stories of absolute catastrophes of decision making as well life-altering ones? Don’t you want to be able to say, “yeah, I did that once, I got a tattoo of a pirate ship on my ass in Cairo” (enter ‘arrrgh, booty’ joke here) or “I met your mother at an all-you-can-eat Shepherd’s pie festival in Kansas City”? Don’t you want to be able to reflect back and recount the days you were scared shitless but happy more than the days you were safe but miserable? Don’t you want to say that you lived life the best way you knew how?
All things are ready, if our minds be so – Henry V
soopastryheart 
The part you mentioned around having stories really resonates. It's one of those things that feels rather important to the point that it helps me feel like a sense of accomplishment. A story is something that is formulated because there's something to be shared and understood from listening /reading about it. Stories don't have to be grand and elaborate, but have a start and an end. Maybe that's what's so meaningful. A story is a reminder that what we started off with has some sort of ending to it, whether it's good or bad.
Anyways, I continue to enjoy your writing Soo. It bothers me that I have to wait until 1:37am to stumble upon this again to catch up.