what i wanted for twenty
i turn 21 in less than two weeks, eleven days (or ten if bearblog posts this on the fifteenth instead of the fourteenth) to be exact. I cant put my tongue on describing exactly how I feel about it. quite honestly, i haven't put much thought into it. i remember turning twenty like it was yesterday though, i remember spending the morning crying for some reason, then having my session interrupted by my grandparents calling me to wish me a happy birthday. they asked me when i was coming to visit, to which i told them i wasn't going to visit them since i was drained after balancing work and school on my very thin willpower. i went down to see my parents and sisters, it was the usual, hugs, kisses, calling more family all together. i answered some texts from the friends who had sent me well wishes. that was it.
it felt like a normal day all in all, but for some reason i felt so miserable about it. this was it, i had done practically nothing with my life up till then, i hated how i had been living, and now i was about to spend the next six or seven (if im lucky) decades feeling the same way. it just sucked. in some attempt to get out of this rut, i had turned to journaling around this time. i had a very small pocket book, but decided to buy a bigger one to start filling out once i turned twenty. reading it back now, i this is the first line in my freshly pressed notebook.
i dont really understand why i wrote this. i think it was a blanket statement that i had picked up somewhere. i thought that writing this would change my life. in hindsight, its cringe, im kicking myself right now thinking that i really knew what this meant. looking back on being twenty though, i can see that i sort of managed to live by what i had set for myself.
my theory right now is that i probably wrote this after listening to too much lauryn hill. i am an absolute whore for her and her music. for all my distaste in her bible thumping at times, her journey from most loved, to most hated, to this sort of weird place socially where she was just doing her own thing and being herself is one that i can only hope to emulate.
at nineteen, i turned to her mtv unplugged recordings many times. its awkward saying this but her work really was much crutch at times. the intermixing of these beautiful songs centered around hill discovering herself through her music, and these long discussions with herself and the audience about how she had changed and found self-assumed meaning in her life brought me major hope that i could do something similar with myself.
this goal was not very original of me, but i think it still has some merit. a large part of staying true to myself involved learning how to be happy on my own time, putting away the need to appeal others and unlearning the notions of what i perceived to be a "good" life taught by my parents. i think i lived a very isolated life growing up, so by the time i hit twenty and being able to see how everyone else was living, everything i had done up till that point felt unfulfilling.
i do want to say that i dont feel miserable knowing ill be one year older. im actually kind of looking forward to it. i haven't set a resolution for twenty one yet, its too soon for that. i'm still twenty for a few more days so i still have some time to work on staying true to myself :).