Twenty-Time

Twenty-nine has carried a kind of emotional weight I was not prepared for. For many people it's "just another year." But for the first time in my conscious memory, time is passing in a way that almost feels unbearable.

I am suddenly aware that life keeps moving faster and faster, people are aging, and moments disappear while we are still inside of them. I really don’t know what changed or why this year feels different, but it feels like I suddenly woke up in the middle of my own life. Like someone turned the lights on inside my brain after years of moving through survival mode in the dark.

Now everything hurts differently too.

Songs. Smells. Old pictures. Memories I haven't thought about in years. Friends that come and go. It all cuts more deeply than before. For example, I’ll hear one line in a song and feel grief rise into my chest so quickly it catches me off guard: “What if the best I’ve got is already three years gone?” "Just give me five more minutes..."

I know it all sounds dramatic. I know twenty-nine is still young in most adults' eyes. But I think there’s something deeply disorienting about realizing you are no longer waiting for the perfect time for your life to begin.

Because you realize that this is the time.

This is the time you wished to fast forward to years ago.

This is quite possibly even the future version of yourself you used to imagine. The age that once sounded so grown up and impossibly far away, is here. And somehow that realization is both beautiful and devastating.

I also noticed this year I started grieving things while they are still happening.

My own youth while I’m still technically young, versions of myself that only exist now in old photos and memories, and even my children’s childhoods while they are still living them. (That one hurts the most.) I look at them and realize these are the days I will ache to have back. I know one day I'll want to give anything to hear their little voices, see their messy toys, and feel their tiny hands reaching for me again.

There is something so cruel and beautiful about loving a moment while simultaneously mourning the fact that it cannot stay.

There is also something cruel and beautiful about being brave while tears are streaming down your face.

And maybe that’s why this year changed me so much. I had no choice but to be brave. I stopped moving through life numb to it, and I started noticing everything. The passage of time, the changes in my face and body, and how differently I carry myself. I noticed how true exhaustion settles in, but anything is survivable once enough time passes.

This was also the year I changed my "look." I bought expensive makeup, hair extensions, hair bows, contacts, skincare, and other tiny beautiful things that probably looked superficial from the outside, but felt strangely emotional to me because I didn't care about how I looked for a long time. I think in buying all of that, I was trying to reconnect with myself. I was trying to find proof that underneath the stress and responsibility and years of surviving, there was still a young woman in there somewhere who wanted to feel beautiful and alive and soft again.

This was also the year I went back to school and realized not only that my brain still worked, but also that it could thrive. And I mean really thrive. I fell in love with a profession that challenged me, humbled me, emotionally wrecked me at times, and somehow still made me feel more capable and alive than I had in years. Somewhere between the stress, exhaustion, and moments I (still) genuinely doubt myself, I rediscovered a version of me that was intelligent, driven, compassionate, and still capable of becoming more than the life I had convinced myself I was already limited to. For the first time in a long time, I stopped feeling like I was merely surviving my life and started feeling like I was becoming someone inside of it.

I found pieces of myself I genuinely thought I had lost forever.

And this was also the year I finally accepted help.

I accepted medication for my anxiety. In that, I accepted that strength is not the same thing as suffering silently. I accepted that maybe I did not have to spend my entire life emotionally white-knuckling my way through all of the hard things. That realization broke me open a little more publicly than I wanted.

There were enormous and terrifying moments when I genuinely did not know who I was becoming or how I would get through it. And moments where I mourned younger versions of myself so intensely it felt almost physical, because I finally understand how quickly life disappears.

One day you’re a little kid. Then suddenly you’re staring at yourself in a mirror at twenty-nine wondering where all the years went and why your heart feels too heavy for your chest. And why you are also now the BIGGEST sucker for nostalgia and anything marketed with the word "vintage." Somewhere inside all of this -ahem- mess, there has also been something extraordinary: growth.

The kind of growth that changes the way you look at a sunrise.

The kind that makes ordinary moments feel sacred.

The kind that screams at the top of your lungs in the highway wind to your favorite throwback song.

The kind that stopped waiting for life to happen and made me realize I am already in it.

xoxo

Madi