My Advice on How to Get Through Your Twenties Unscathed
Last year, I wrote an article where I asked friends, family, and other writer friends what advice they would give someone turning twenty-five. I got some great life advice from a lot of very different men and women which I knew the readers would love. The thing is, despite me writing that article, I didn’t provide any advice for myself.
I reread this article recently and thought to myself, why not? I like to think of myself as smart and intuitive. I’ve got some life experience under my belt. I’ve learned a lot of great lessons, most of them the hard way. Why couldn’t I share some of them with people? What I think the reason could be is because I never backed myself. I know that I’m a pretty great person (if I do say so myself) but for some reason, I didn’t think that other people would.
So here’s my humble advice to get you through your 20’s.
I recently turned 26. Not a special age by any means. It’s closer to thirty than it is to twenty but really, just another year. The thing is, this year everything in my life changed. Everything.
I realised that I wasn’t happy with myself, emotionally and physically. I wasn’t healthy, but not because I was sick, because I stopped caring about myself. The job that I used to love started to become something I hated. My long-term relationship was on the rocks and I felt like I was standing on a rope bridge strung across a hundred metre canyon. There was a storm wind blowing like it does right before it started pouring down rain during a Summer storm and the bridge was about to flip over. I was about to fall off.
And I felt like this consistently for about 6 months. Every day I thought to myself, “Why do I feel like this?”
Why couldn’t I stabilise my rope bridge?
Because I was expecting everyone else to stabilise it for me.
You see, I’m fundamentally lazy. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. It’s something I don’t like about myself, but I’m aware of it and I’ve been working on it. I wanted everyone else to run onto my bridge and help weigh me down and stop my flipping.
What I realised is that you, and only you, are in charge of your own happiness.
Look, I know how silly that sounds. I’m a pretty independent person. I moved out of my parent's home when I was 17 and have been self-sufficient ever since. I’m a feminist and I’ve always thought that I knew what it meant to be happy.
I generally think of myself as a happy person. But how do you know if you’re really happy? Because I now know that there is a huge difference between being genuinely happy and thinking that you were.
Let me take a step back. Let’s go back to mid-2017. I was content with my life. I had just moved into a nice new house with my partner of five years. We’d just adopted a second cat. We were talking about getting engaged. I had a job where I felt valued and I was winning awards for. Everything seemed perfect. But it wasn’t.
In the last year, I’d put on 20 kilos and I had stopped socialising with my friends because I wasn’t happy with the way I looked. I stayed at home most weekends unless it was a special occasion like a friend’s birthday. I didn’t have many hobbies except Netflix binges and writing, none of with involved friends or getting up from the coach. And even though I had started writing and was loving it, I was stressing myself out trying to make money from it. All of this started a chain reaction. Problems started brewing in my relationship. I was completely and wholly dependent on my partner to be my lover, my best friend, and my entire social life.
Emily Esfahani Smith has spent her life studying the psychology of happiness. She said in a recent TED Talk that while our lives are better in almost every conceivable standard, people feel more helpless, depressed and alone than we ever did before. I had everything I could possibly want – the house, the happy relationship, the job – but I was still so unhappy.
Then one not-so-special day, it hit me like a freight train. The stuff that I thought could make me happy was the stuff that was outside of my control. They were the things that related to other people.
I could do my best to fix my relationship but 50% of that was reliant on my partner. I could do my best at work but getting a promotion was 100% up to my boss. My struggle with body image and not having a wide support circle was 100% in my control but I was doing nothing about it.
Esfahani Smith talks about true happiness not coming from an elusive search for happiness, but instead from finding meaning in your life. It comes from finding belonging and purpose, but more than that, it takes transcendence. That is the ability to completely focus and engage with something that makes you happy. And it takes what I think is probably the most important, and also the hardest, it takes changing the way you tell your story to others. It takes a full shift in your worldview to find meaning. By changing your mindset and saying “I found clarity by fixing my relationship” instead of “I was unhappy because my job and my relationship” you instantly remember the progress you have made, rather than how much you still have to go.
I don’t know if this was something that happens to everyone and I just had to learn as part of growing up, or if it was something that was specific to me. But I learned what would make me happy.
And this is my advice to anyone in their twenties. Stop relying on someone else’s actions to make you happy. Stop expecting people to do something, and then subsequently being disappointed that they didn’t do it. Live in the moment instead of making up fantasies in your head that very rarely come true. Surround yourself with people who make you feel like you belong in their lives. Find a purpose to do something, no matter how big or small that may be. Give things your complete and unyielding focus – but not all the time, just for the things that bring you joy. And change the way you tell your story. I promise you, it will make you happier.
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