7/7/25

Beyond anything else in the human experience, the one thing we all genuinely strive for is connection. We long to relate, to be seen and heard, and most of all understood. But as we age, our ability to do so is skewed by the ways in which we've grown accustomed to doing it in the past, and we begin to fall into the valley of the mid-20s scarries. One's mid-20s offer many things; the ability to hang on to our youth, and contrastingly, our ability to be presented as mature adults. We are ready to be done growing, but still require the experiences yet to come in order to do so. But one of the things that one's 20s truly changes our outlook on the lives we are about to embark on. 

 The past two decades of my life can be summarized into one category - learning lessons. I learned how to place myself outside of my comfort zone, and just as important, I learned when not to. I discovered the things I require within the life I build for myself, and the things I am willing to sacrifice. I hear the rhetoric consistently that at a certain point, we have to let go of our pasts. However, any letting go I would partake in would also result in sacrifices I am not willing to make, largely because, in a rare case of finding a few diamonds in the rough, I have taken parts of those past lives with me into adulthood. I have learned that, despite the challenges and lessons that being young allowed, youth also offers a perspective of connection that is hard to ever attain again. Friends who have grown into something more adjacent to a sibling have seen me grow for the last 15 years, and with that, some of the most beautiful relationships I could ever ask for have grown alongside us. With that comes an equal amount of challenges. In my 20s, on the cusp of true independence, unlike anything I've known before, I stare down the barrel of two options. I can remain where I am, knowing that I have found rare cases of beautiful individuals in admittedly hopeless situations - or I can move on. I can thrust myself into the mire of an adult life, surrounded by cubicles and powdered creamer packets coupled with Folgers coffee grounds, and accept the risk that my prime years are behind me, or, I can challenge myself with one of the hardest hurdles yet to come my way - finding new adult friends. Pre-college graduate years prepare us for many things: a grueling workload, unyielding upper management, and a potentially joyless experience centered around whether or not groceries will fit into this month's budget. The one thing it does not prepare us for is how to do so socially. 

In grade school, I was accompanied by a maximum of 20 peers. Similarly, my high school class size maxed out at 25. Though I was able to drag a few shining stars in the objectively dismal situation out with me, that isn't to say I didn't shoot for more at the time. We are given options. Either go through the experience alone,  or don't. However, when surrounded by people I could not go a day without seeing if I wanted to, it was much easier to lean toward the former; finding a few to keep in my later life being a happy coincidence. College was the first taste of something different. It isn't rare to go through college largely by yourself, especially for someone as admittedly unsociable as I find myself to be on more than a few occasions. Unlike the hospital-lit hallways of high school or the crowded room of desks in grade school, there are no requirements for companionship in college. That being said, it is inherently an innate aspect of the human experience to want camaraderie, or at least a confidant, along the way. Despite a loosening of the reins, college is more prone to a false sense of independence. One may feel like they have finally achieved adulthood, planning their own schedule, and making friends of their own accord rather than as a result of class size, yet you are still surrounded by older adults giving directions, and younger adults feeling lost at hearing them. It isn't until graduation that you realize how much grasp the same shoot you had gone down the previous 12 years still had on you, just to suddenly be relinquished with a "congratulations" and "good luck". My biggest fear of an independent life is not job acquisition, though there is plenty to be said for that as well, nor monthly payments. I'm not scared about living on my own, or moving somewhere new (again). I know how to pay taxes, and I've been budgeting for my entire life. What scares me is what I am going to do with all the relationships that have carried me through it all.

 I expected to make friends in high school, and furthermore, I expected to lose them. There is a certain comfort in the fleeting efforts of being young, knowing that, regardless of how much you want something to last forever, it is rare that a moment at the age of 15 will truly be everlasting. You lose your friends, and you cry about it, but there is the understanding that, given a few months, you will make some more. You have all four years of college to make, presumably, the relationships that can last a lifetime. But now I am moving again, with no planned years, or institution to allow an ease of access to new companions. What makes adult friends feel so daunting is that every single person is going through the same process. I am moving back home, finding a job, and working toward my career. My college best friend is moving back home - to the opposite side of the country - and then moving again, and then moving again, and then once more to pursue a career of her own. My sibling best friend is staying here, where we moved together, and finishing her degree. We all have boyfriends and houses on different sides of the country. We will have jobs, and apartments, and lives to attend to beyond the stress of wanting and trying to maintain our connection to one another. Despite the challenges we have faced in the past, the separation that we have consequently overcome, the time we spend together, and the time we've spent apart, there is no denying the difference in living across the hall from one another, to living across the country. And the true make-or-break of the mid-20s is what to do with it all. 

There will be coworkers and a handful of kind-hearted neighbors to pick from. But unlike a class, they can be easily avoided. Adult friends are challenging because finding one is no longer as easy as asking them to be yours. The fear I am feeling is not out of the stress of maintaining the friends I do have, but of the unknown potential without the comfort of group projects or cramped dorm rooms to create a flow of conversation. At this point in my life, though financially independent as I have been for the last four years, I am for the first time alone. Not in any solitary definition of the word, in fact, I am surrounded by a higher concentration of good, kind-hearted people than I have ever been before. But rather in the way that the next few decades of my life rely solely on my ability to plan for it - an aspect of myself I am confident in, but what 22-year-old fresh out of college wouldn't be naive enough to think that? 

The connections we make in our lives are truly what guide us through them. I won't make more friends in high school, nor will I ever knock on another dorm room door to introduce myself. I am perfectly content with the friends I have right at this moment, but a million things could occur to change their context. I think the only reason my thoughts are stuck on the cautious side of these next steps, regardless of how excited I am to take them, is because, for the first time, I am aware of my ignorance. Going into college and even high school, I attained the false sense of self-confidence that can only be achieved within the teenage mind. The aspect of youth that tells you "you have it all figured out", now, the only thing the almost-complete development of my frontal lobe has truly achieved in changing is that I am aware of my own naivety. I can plan every step of my life to a tee, I can assume I'll be friendly at my job, make a few acquaintances to grab drinks with at some Irish pub on the East Side, I can apply for jobs and begin my career, but what do I actually know about starting it? Two years ago, I thought I was going to stay in Phoenix forever, 2.5 years ago I thought I was going to move to Los Angeles, and one year ago I didn't think I would make it through another year of college. 

There is no planning to be done for this next chapter of my life, largely if not exclusively because I can't. I can try my best to have a guidebook to follow, to know when I would like to have this kind of job, or how I would like to act within it. But the truth of the mid-20s scarries is that we are all going through it together; separately, but together, and not a single one of us has it figured out. We each have our own friends we long to hold onto, and we each desperately want the ability to make new ones. We will all have our own lives to attend to, and before we know it, we're in our 30s. Every step of our lives has relied heavily on "putting ourselves out there," and now, we actually have to. Despite having no rules to follow or the instructor to listen to, our ability to connect in life, to each other, to ourselves, will now and forever be guided by how we've been doing it thus far. In many cases, I find myself to be very lucky, knowing that, no matter how many connections I make later down the line, I believe the ones I have now will last forever. All we can do is push onward, and hope that the most human aspect of ourselves, our desire to relate to one another, to be seen and heard, will continue to be all we need to accomplish such a thing.