The Chaos of Being in your Twenties

for the twenty-somethings who feel everything all at once.

Sometimes, I think being twenty-something is like standing on the edge of a train platform, one foot still in the station of childhood, the other stepping into a future we’re told we should have planned by now. Everyone keeps asking who we are, what we want, and where we’re going, and we want to answer, we do, but some days it feels like we’re just making it up as we go. Like we’re wearing adulthood like an oversized coat, hoping no one notices it doesn’t quite fit yet.

We were promised a world told we could be anything, do anything. But no one said to us that everything comes at a cost. That chasing dreams would sometimes mean losing people. Building a life means questioning everything you once believed. That outgrowing a version of yourself could feel like grieving someone you used to love.

No one told us how lonely it would be.

Like, this age is so strange. We're too young to know better but too old to make the same mistakes. We’re expected to build a life from scratch, relationships, careers, routines, identities, all while our minds are still cluttered with childhood fears, unhealed memories, and dreams we’re too scared to say out loud.

We grew up with the internet, which raised us. It taught us how to communicate, but forgot to teach us how to connect. Everyone looks like they’re living their best lives traveling, partying, falling in love, but most of us are just trying to survive our own thoughts. We compare our real lives to someone else’s curated feed and wonder what’s wrong with us. Why don’t we look that happy? Why isn’t our skin that clear, our relationships that cute, our friends that close, our careers that shiny?

And we still scroll through someone’s engagement post, someone’s start-up launch, someone’s solo trip to Japan, someone’s glow-up, someone’s cute relationship, someone’s book deal, someone’s new apartment.
And suddenly, our little efforts, the resume we just made, the meal we just cooked, the small job we got, the poem we wrote in our notes app, feel like it doesn’t matter anymore.
We feel behind. Again.

But also, the truth is that most people are faking it. Most of us are.

We post our wins and hide the breakdowns. We chase aesthetics, not authenticity. We don’t talk about how hard it is to feel seen in a world that only values performance. Or how sometimes we look around and feel like everyone else got the memo except us.

Yet, we are comparing our messy lives to curated perfection, and feeling smaller with every swipe. We crave validation so badly, but we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be truly understood beyond screens and filters.

And friendships, how do we even keep them? We crave closeness, but closeness terrifies us. We want people to see us, truly see us, but fear what they’ll find if they do. So we build walls, little by little, until even the people closest to us feel like strangers behind glass. And when did it become okay for people to drift apart without explanation? We’re busy building careers, handling mental health, trying to stay afloat, but somewhere in all that, we lose the ease of simply being there for each other. We crave real connections, the ones where you don’t have to explain why you’re quiet or why you’re scared. But vulnerability feels risky now, so we hide behind jokes, emojis, and half-hearted “how are you?” texts.

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And then there is loneliness in our 20s, it’s not just the absence of people. It’s the weight of being alone with your thoughts, the ache of feeling misunderstood even by yourself. It’s laughing with friends, but feeling like you’re still on the outside of the circle. It’s being in constant contact with people, but feeling like no one really knows what’s going on inside you. It’s scrolling through endless messages, group chats, and stories, yet feeling as if you disappeared, nothing would really change. It’s when the people around you know your favorite song or your food, but not your fears. Not the reasons why you overthink before sleeping. Not the ache in your chest when you pretend to be okay for the tenth time this week. It’s the dissonance between how connected we are online and how emotionally isolated we’ve become in real life. And worst of all, this kind of loneliness you can’t even explain to anyone, because how do you say, “I feel alone,” when technically, you’re never really alone?

And life doesn’t slow down to let you figure it out. People drift. Not because of some dramatic fallout, but because life pulls in different directions. Priorities shift. Conversations shrink to emojis. Memories become heavier because the people in them no longer fit into your present. One day, you realize you're carrying around the ghosts of people who once felt like your entire world. And you miss them, not just for who they were, but for who you were with them. Now it’s dinner tables full of small talk and smiling for the sake of it. You’re surrounded, but the ache remains the ache of wanting to be hugged without asking, wanting someone to check in without a reason, wanting to feel needed without having to prove your worth. It's realizing that being strong all the time is exhausting, and sometimes you don’t want advice or motivation, you just want someone to sit with you and say, "Yeah, this part is really hard."

And then there’s love!

Love in our twenties isn’t the fairy tale we grew up romanticizing. It’s messier. It’s layered with everything we never healed from, everything we’re still trying to become. It’s meeting people while we’re still building ourselves, unfinished, unsure, scared of needing too much. It's not just about falling in love anymore. It's about timing, about how emotionally available someone is on a random Thursday when you're falling apart. It's wanting to be held, but being too afraid to ask.

We’ve been hurt before. Maybe not all the way shattered, but scratched in places no one else can see. So we flinch when someone gets too close. We sabotage the soft moments. We overthink a delayed reply. We leave before they can leave. Because love, in our 20s, feels like a risk we can't afford to lose again. We've watched the people we thought would stay become strangers. We've unlearned “forever” and replaced it with “for now.”

And sometimes, we don’t even get to love fully. We get half-loves. Almosts. Situationships. People who like the idea of us but aren’t ready for the truth of us, our anxiety, our dreams, our contradictions. So we find ourselves in connections that aren’t safe but feel familiar. We settle for the bare minimum, thinking it’s the most we can ask for. We romanticize crumbs, call them dinner. We stay in things that don’t feel good because at least it’s something. At least we’re not alone.

But even when we try to leave all that behind and be “okay,” it’s not easy. Because we live in a world that feels like it was built to keep us distracted, endless scrolling, endless noise, endless comparisons. It’s like every day we’re being told who to be, what to want, how to look, how to think. And it gets so loud in our heads, we forget what our own voice even sounds like. We wake up tired, not just from lack of sleep, but from trying to keep up with everything. We’re manipulated by screens that know exactly how to keep us hooked, feeding us beauty standards, relationship goals, hustle culture, all wrapped in filters and fake smiles. Everything’s so curated, so polished, so performative. And somehow, we still feel like we’re falling behind.

And underneath it all, there’s this quiet, relentless pressure. To have it all figured out. To be successful by 25. To have a “thing”, a brand, a talent, a side hustle, a relationship that looks good in photos. Everyone’s selling something: their art, their image, their time, sometimes even their soul. We’ve turned into products, chasing metrics instead of meaning. We’re told our worth lives in numbers in likes, in follower counts, in job titles. No one asks if we’re happy. They just want to know if we’re productive. If we’re doing enough. If we’re making it. Whatever making it even means anymore.

But it’s not all dark. Somewhere in this chaos, we’re learning. Learning what matters. Who matters. What does it mean to slow down. What does it mean to be gentle with ourselves and with others. We’re learning to let go of timelines and trust our pace. To stop chasing validation and start choosing peace.

We’re learning that it's okay to change. To start over. To leave places, people, and versions of ourselves behind. That healing is not linear. That growth isn’t always aesthetic. That crying in your car at 2 PM and laughing over cheap thrifts at 7 PM can both exist on the same day, and that’s still a good day.

We’re not lost, we’re just in the middle of figuring things out.
We’re not behind, we’re moving at a pace that makes sense for who we are right now.
We’re not failures, we’re human, and we’re allowed to feel everything deeply while we try to make sense of it all.

So here’s to this strange, tender chapter we call our twenties….
To the mess and the magic.
To the nights we fell apart and the mornings we pulled ourselves back together.
To the love we gave too easily, and the boundaries we’re still learning to set.
To the friendships that saved us and the silences that shaped us.
To everything we lost. To everything we’re still hoping for.
To become slowly, painfully, beautifully the people we’re meant to be.

We're all just trying. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

So raise a glass, or a coffee cup, or your phone light
To the people we once were, the ones we’re becoming, and the ones we’ll look back on one day and whisper,
“I made it through.”

This one’s for us, the beautifully unfinished, gloriously confused, deeply feeling twenty-somethings.
We're not behind. We're just unfolding.

With love,
From a 21-year-old who still feels everything all at once.

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