You’re a 5 year old kid and your world crashes down around you because your classmate broke your favourite coloured crayon. Then you go home, get in a fight with your brother because you didn’t want to share. So you find yourself alone in your room wondering if the world (your parents) has forgotten about you because this time out is lasting forever!
Ten years later you’re 15, half way through high school and struggling to figure out “who you are” even though this won’t happen for another 10 years. Who your friends are and who is or isn’t mad at you, how your rugby team is doing, and how you played at field hockey last night are all that’s on your mind while you sit through class. Between those thoughts and staring at the dreamy boy (or girl) on the other side of the room, you think about how stressful life is.
In another three years you’ve completed your first semester at university and in those first few months your entire world has turned upside down and around three times. Nothing you did up until the first day of university truly prepped you for it. But what could? Everything is uncertain – what am I even doing here? Is this person really my friend or do they just think I’m smart? Do I like my major? Should I change it? Will I get a job when I graduate? Will I ever drink again and NOT get hungover? Does he like me or does he just want to sleep with me? And everything is a first – first love, first apartment, first roommates, first bills to pay on your own, first jobs, first time struggling at a class that used to be your best, first time making your own decisions about life, first time realizing that if you don’t do groceries they won’t appear in your fridge, first time taking care of yourself when you get sick. The lists go on and on. But you got through, you figured it out, you graduated, and even have some great memories to prove it wasn’t all difficult.
After a couple years of loving the liberty of not being in school for the first time in your life; working many jobs, traveling, going on various adventures – you realize you need to get your crap together, move out of mom’s house and get a full time job. Well that’s harder than expected and takes a heck of a lot of work. Like when you spend hundreds of hours applying to over 80 jobs and don’t get one interview. Alas, yet another time in life where you’re figuring things out, making things work, and pretending you know what you’re doing until you start to convince yourself.
This is the toughest part so far. It’s the first time you haven’t had a path you’re ‘supposed to take’. Up until now you’ve always known what’s coming next. And along with the liberation comes fear.
In this day and age jobs are extremely hard to come by. It seems you need to know someone who happens to be hiring in your field or at least in a field that you are capable of working in… and that person has to want to hire you. The chance of these acquaintances hanging around are quite low, and therefore the majority of twenty-somethings are struggling. So we travel. We joke about how adulting is hard. We workout. And sometimes we just get drunk.
It’s that weird age where you have at least one friend who is engaged, one who is galavanting another country, one who is married and starting a family, one who is partying as often as possible, one who is still unemployed living with their parents, and one who landed an amazing job and is basically rich and famous. And then there’s you and you think – What the hell am I doing?! Do I be patient and wait it out to just see what happens? Or do I try to find a way to grab the bull by the horns?
Society is a really difficult thing these days for young adults because everything has very recently changed or is in the midst of changing. People used to live by certain standards – standards which essentially planned your life out for you. Today these standards have been trampled and we have to figure it out on our own. 99.9% of me loves this! I love that we get to be our unique selves and live the lives we want to live. This can only promote greater happiness in the westernized human population (which is definitely something I think is lacking, generally speaking). But that 0.01% of me wants someone to just tell me what to do!! Tell me what job to do, tell me where to live, tell me what to do with my life. This is the child coming out wishing my dear mother would just have all the answers for me. But it’s not truly what I want, it’s not a real wish – it’s my fear speaking.
Life is SCARY! Who knew?! Well – probably everyone past their twenties (give or take a few).
The unknown is a terrifying thought, no matter what it relates to. But it also allows us the one thing that keeps people going in the toughest of times – hope. The future will always be scary, and the past will always seem easy. But in the moment, your scary problem is always scary and it’s always your problem – even if you know that in a year (or 5) you will laugh at yourself for worrying about such an ‘insignifant’ thing. But the truth is that anything that carries your focus or worry for any amount of time is significant in some way. And that matters.
We always wish to be living like a kid again, but as a kid we always pretend to be our parents, we love when we get to do things by ourselves, and we are devastated when our favourite coloured crayon breaks. Perhaps we should just try to live in the moment, as cliché as that sounds, and take life a day or a week at a time. Set some realistic goals, accomplish them, and repeat. Appreciate the people around you and let yourself feel that fear that life so nonchalantly throws at us. If for anything, so that you can feel the amazing sense of hope that pulls you out of dark holes, lets you walk aross quicksand, and allows you to fly through the dark sky like a shooting star – a beacon of hope for anyone lucky enough to witness your fire. Because that’s what you are, what we all are. Small, similar, yet very different bright stars in this universe who each leave our own impression on the world as we know it.
Be a unicorn. Be you. Leave your own impression on this beautiful world.
Just Breathe 
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