happy (early?) birthday!! 🎉 Idk what advice to give because i feel like the 20-somethings now are more emotionally aware than the 20-somethings from even as recent as a decade ago, but tune into your body, give yourself grace, and listen to others’ stories without feeling pressured to model your life after someone else’s. & if you don’t know what you want your life to look like yet that’s okay! ❤️
At 21 I was in my senior year of college and engaged to be married within the year after graduation. In the southern religious environment we were in this wasn’t abnormal, but in retrospect that was soooo young to get married and I don’t think I would have so quickly if I hadn’t been so desperate to get out of a problematic family situation that involved some financial abuse. Despite changing A LOT over the past decade+ my partner and I are still together, and I look back at 21 as a time when I most followed the social script expected of me and coasted on that for a while, until it all started to fall apart (in an ultimately good if devastating way) when I became a mom at 24.
tl;dr: my 21 was tame and mellow and happy but i had no idea who i was or what i could be and now i do have a stronger sense of that at 32 and that feels better
