“How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?”
- Taylor Swift from the song “Nothing New”
As you can probably tell, I am a HUGE Taylor Swift fan. I don’t think a lot of people (especially guys) understand the reason why we all love Taylor Swift so much and her music. “She just writes about break-ups”. First off, totally not true. She writes about everything, from mental health issues to grief of a loved one. Second, her music makes us all feel seen and validated in our feelings. But this post isn’t about Taylor Swift or her song, its about the feeling of wondering “how the hell did I get here?”
The reason I love this quote is because I feel seen. I feel like I’m not alone in where I am at in my life. When I was 18, I had everything figured out. In my journal I had exactly what I would do each semester of college; I planned when I would take the MCAT and what internships I would apply to. You would think that as more time went on you would have more figured out. I mean its only natural to think that. When you “grow up” you gain more wisdom through experiences, your frontal lobe begins to become more developed, and you become your own individual person.
At least that’s what I thought. Now I am 23 and I feel even more lost than ever. I can’t pinpoint exactly when that became the case, but if I had to guess, it would be the second I crossed that stage after receiving my bachelor’s degree. In the moment I was so excited to finally feel like I accomplished what I had been working toward the past 4 years, but then it hit me, I have absolutely no idea what’s next. Like long-term next. At the time I was still finishing up paramedic school, so I had a slight safety net, but that quickly vanished 4 months later.
Now, I have 2 degrees, a lease in a city I no longer feel I belong and a job that I feel like is holding me back. Great. Every part of me wants to view this as newfound freedom. I can do whatever I want and go wherever I want. But as amazing as that sounds, I see all my friends start their careers and settle down and I couldn’t be more jealous. Seeing everyone else portray that they have everything figured out makes me feel alone and isolated. I hope I’m not the only one that feels that way, but it’s difficult especially when our society equates to having a career and settling down as a success and everything else is subpar.
I keep thinking back to the question of how I got here and I realized that what I thought was a negative connotation to that question is actually quite the opposite. I realized that I am a completely different person than I was 5 years ago. You may be thinking “well obviously” but it really isn’t that obvious. It doesn’t happen overnight, and you don’t think about it on a daily basis. It’s when I started writing this that over the past 5 years, I’ve dealt with grief and unforeseen obstacles, but I also lived life to the fullest, had experiences that scared the living shit out of me, helped strangers and formed my own identity. And 5 years from now, when everything will be different, and I will ask myself the same question and probably have a different response.
But to anyone reading this, whatever you may be going through, I hope you feel a little less alone and realize no one has everything figured out and we are all trying to navigate this crazy world to the best of our ability.
So, with that…. should I get a Taylor Swift tattoo?
