The 20-Something's Metamorphosis

I’m beginning to realize that I have lived a life.

You can’t tell if you need a hobby, or a career change, or a long walk. There are feelings you have that you haven’t figured out yet, and a part of you wants to lock them in a box and throw them into the ocean of your mind, chained up and locked down, weights and all. You picture those feelings: blue, glowing, a small cube that you can’t grasp but fits into a brown chest. You throw it off a pier and watch it sink, but the ghost of it floats back up every time. You want to ask why, but you don’t, because you know. You’ve never been good at putting things away; you’re the best at bringing them back to the surface. 

There’s a journal entry I wrote in August of last year that I have yet to dig up because the fear of my failure is ingrained in me. But I remember the gist of it: I dreamt of an apartment with big windows, natural lighting, walking distance from a bookstore. Being a successful author, having an agent, a book tour. My wildest dreams written out on a single page, and I tried to convince myself that my life could look like that in a year.

It doesn’t. And it’s not better than this fantasy either. There’s a bittersweet feeling that lifts in my chest, my throat, that tells me that not all things are within my grasp. Sometimes, you reach for the things you want and come back with only a fistful of air. But your fingers stretch far enough to get a glimpse, a taste, a sign that just because you’re moving slowly doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path.

I’ve gotten to a place where I wake up and realize that my life has entirely changed. My apartment looks different than it did this time last year—my mattress isn’t on the floor anymore, I have a couch and a TV, two litterboxes and an extra clothing rack. I still walk to the same coffee shop down the street, but now I can choose to drive in my bright red hatchback, and the baristas know my name When I don’t stop by for a week, they say, “Hey, it’s been a while. How are you?” They ask me for my order but they also tell me about the plants on their shelves and their linen blue bedsheets. There are people whose lives I know better now, that I never knew existed just a few short weeks ago.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy to get out of bed and embrace it all. What they don’t often tell you about change is that it’s exhausting—getting out of bed before 10am can be a challenge, mainly because the sheer amount of change can take a toll on your routine. I don’t know what I like to do anymore; I always forget to journal, I don’t make my coffee the same way I used to, I don’t enjoy yoga as much anymore, so what do I do now? Does the world have anything in store for you if you haven’t prepared for it to?

Most of the time, you’re not aware of it when you go through a metamorphosis. You just look over your shoulder one day and see the shedding you left behind, and realize, Oh. You examine your skin, your hair, and think, I’ve become something entirely new. When did that happen?

But when you’re aware of the change as it happens, it’s something much more terrifying. There’s no nonchalance to it. You feel the cocoon wrapping around you, tighter, blocking your vision, and you’ve never considered yourself claustrophobic until now. It doesn’t feel instinctual like they said it would; a part of you wants to resist, to go back to what you knew, because you were comfortable then. You know that when this cocoon sheds, when it all falls apart, you’ll be entirely exposed in this new, unrecognizable being you didn’t know could exist.

I broke my front tooth when I was seven years old after falling off my bike on a campground in July. It was one of my first adult teeth, and a fake one remains in its place to this day. At the time, my Dad comforted me through my tears by revealing that he had fake teeth in his own mouth, which was news to my mother, despite their having been married over a decade by then. He’d said that it hadn’t seemed important to disclose.

I’m beginning to realize that I have lived a life. I have things that have happened to me that nobody knows about, things I’ll have to live with forever. A part of me wants to sit down one day and tell someone everything. Write a memoir, expose myself wholly and say, Look, this is who I am and who I’ve been, and I hope you’ll love it anyway.

Another part of me wants to write my story just for myself. Hold it close to my chest, see if I can make sense of the person I am today by the things that I’ve gone through. I want to lay it out like a puzzle that paints a clear picture of what I’ve become and forces me to accept that sometimes there’s no reason why things happen, except that it pushes us in the direction of something new.

In an essay for a friend’s newsletter, I wrote, “I am 22 years old and terrified of the notion that I will be someone else entirely in 10 years. My iPhone scans the faces of everyone I’ve taken pictures of and groups them into their own albums, and there are somehow 3 different albums of myself. She is 16, she is 19, she is 22, and technology no longer recognizes her as the same person. There is a definitive split between my teenhood self and I, only recognizable in thin-faced frames and smudged eyeliner, a few recent selfies accidentally looped into an album of blurry moments from 2019.”

I am still 22 years old and I am still terrified by the ruckus of life. I struggle to write about myself in the first person these days because I don’t know who she’ll be next week. As a teenager who used to have her whole life planned out—graduating college with a journalism degree at 21, working as a journalist while writing a novel on the side, married by 23, successful novelist by 25, kids at 27—the uncertainty of it all shakes me to my core.

I keep waiting for a map to fall at my feet, leading me to whatever surely has to have been predetermined for me, but there is no hero’s journey here. There’s no prophecy to take me by the hand. There’s only what I have in front of me: the life that began to happen, both purposefully and accidentally, and put one shaky foot in front of the other.

Change comes when we least expect it and there is no way to be prepared. When we shed our skin, all we can do is tuck that ghost under your arm, walk away from the edge of the pier, and get a new hobby. Consider changing your career. Take a long walk. Bring everything to the surface and hold it tight. Get used to the feeling of your new skin, your shape, because you don’t know how long you’ll have it, and you want to remember it. You have to—because one day, far from here, the memory will be all you have left.

Hi :)

It’s been a while. These past few months, I’ve been writing my little heart out, but I just haven’t been doing it here. But I missed you, and I missed hearing your thoughts on my thoughts, so I could only stay away for so long.

I plan on returning for my monthly rambles, just as I always have, but excuse me if I need to get my bearings at first. I can’t promise to be perfect, but I can promise to be (mostly) present.

Anyway, the usual housekeeping: you can find me and my events on Instagram, and my book on Amazon. I love you. Thanks for being here with me.

p.m.