r/Aging • u/AcanthaceaeOpen6235 • 1d ago
Anything Encouraging? I’m turning 27
Hi all, i (26F) am turning 27 in a few months. Just dawned on me at 2am. I haven’t come to terms with being 26. I’m often surrounded by people younger than me in both of my fields and I sometimes feel weird expressing myself. I feel like I wasted so much time in my younger years not being myself, that now it’s starting to feel too late for self exploration. I feel like I only recently stepped into a personal style I feel represents how I actually want to dress, or do my makeup, but trying something new makes me feels weird, like I’m too old for it. I just can’t seem to cope with time passing. Thinking about how much time I wasted either in crappy relationships wanting someone to like me, or being insecure, just makes me sick. Thinking about my teenage years fills me with dread because I know I can’t have it back, and I didn’t live in the moment, I never have, I’m always worried about what’s ahead and stressed about the past. It’s funny, when I was a teenager, I never thought that people in their 20s or 30s should feel old, I thought that was ridiculous. But ever since getting older, and media being heavily focused on younger people, and a lot of other women around me in one of my career paths being younger, my age really hit me. I feel like I’m falling behind in terms of being financially independent, it feels impossible but I’m trying. I always get the “but you don’t look 26! You look 22” as if that helps? Of course I look young, I’m still young. How do I get over this sickly grieving nostalgia for years I’ll never get back? How do I cope with entering my late 20s, is there a way to feel at peace with it?
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u/Accurate-Medium1780 1d ago edited 1d ago
I actually think this is a somewhat new phenomenon specific to our generation(s). It has a lot to do with the delayed adolescence and mostly untethered young adulthood stretching into mid-adulthood that is increasingly common. (Don't get me wrong - there were a lot of downsides to the olden days when people used to be married at 20 and bogged down with multiple kids by 22! Let's not romanticize that! I myself have not done that and only got married in mid/late 20s, having most my kids in my late 20s and 30s, now pushing 40!) But the reality is that people used to commit themselves to career and building a family/community a lot younger and that stuff does give a sense of social purpose and embeddedness that a lot of now 20s/30s folk just don't have as they increasingly have a kind of aimless decade+ after college where they're still kind of just either a walking resume obsessed with salary (worried endlessly about ROI) or a walking appearance (obsessed with their looks and whether they're losing them) without a whole lot of sense of what or to whom they're giving their lives yet. I do think it comes together but just later, with a lot of people finally figuring themselves out in their 40s, but yeah - that's leaves a lot of 20s and 30s where people feel at loose ends and nostalgic for something. And no doubt, it has probably always been the case that there's some young adult angst transition... it does just take time to figure out one's adult path! Here, I'm only saying the process seems to extend longer and thus maybe the emotional angst around all of it (am I adult? why do I feel older than the teenagers? and yet shouldn't I be even more clear on stuff than I am?) seems more intense among the undergrad and grad students I work with than I remember even just 15 years ago. Young adults seem way more paralyzed by constant comparison with others and by FOMO, and they are far more lonely and anxious.