Welcome To Club 20s
In my teen years, I wanted nothing but to sprint into my 20s. The decade has always been a symbol of freedom to me. I wanted to become a twenty something year old living in a big city, with a big girl job, surrounded by my best friends and host dinners every Sunday. To be honest, this dream was greatly influenced by the show F.R.I.E.N.DS and I’ve since learnt that fiction really isn’t real life. But I’m not the only one who heralds the 20s. Brands are obsessed with people in their 20s. Shows are targeted at twenty somethings. Even the older ones want to be 20 again.
So, why are we all obsessed with the 20s? Because it’s the decade of becoming. For most of our lives we have been paddling in the water with floaties, the 20s pull away those floaties and ask that you swim. So, you begin to flail, flap, fightto stay afloat. In rare occasions, we learn to swim and in others, people keep our heads above the water.
The 20s are a messy decade, a very confusing time. Your identity is being formed. You discard beliefs you once held, pick up new ones and sometimes you return to old ones. They are the evolving years. The years that demand balance from you; career, finance, relationships, communities and you learn later on that you are no Barbie so you can’t walk on a straight line with blocks heaped on your head. You start to wonder how did we move from chanting 2 *1=2 to trying to hack LinkedIn and finding a job title for your haphazard work life to learning about investments and feeling ashamed of your saving habits to forgetting birthdays and rescheduling hangouts for the umpteenth time, to wondering how you are on your tenth talking stage of the year to racing task deadlines, career deadlines, biological deadlines, financial deadlines, all kinds of deadlines.
The content creator Elle Louise Wilmot captures this decade well in the viral TikTok poem; The Panic Years;
The Panic years, that’s how my 20s have felt anyways.
A panic to be perfect, to have everything figured out before 30.
A panic to stay ahead of the cost-of-living crisis, buy a house,
All whilst staying present because “you’re only in your 20s once” remember?
A panic when people’s success on LinkedIn makes your stomach drop.
A panic when you’ve got no plans on a Friday night but the rest of Instagram stories does.
A panic to constantly self-improve, to read more books, until reading more books becomes more of a chore than a hobby that you do just to tick off a to do list.
A panic to make people proud and to spend time with aging grandparents.
To keep up with trends, plans with friends and skincare.
Quite frankly, I am tired of panicking about the panic years but I know I’m gonna continue to panic about them anyway.
Like Wilmot, I do believe my 20s have felt like being trapped in a panic room but I also see them as the becoming years. Becoming isn’t neat. It’s a lot of trials and reruns. Becoming is marked by spirals. I like to think that when you turn 20, in adult years, you are one. It’s like starting a second life, a much more challenging one.
The 20s are a decade I think about constantly, partly because I am experiencing it but also because about a billion people are experiencing it with me. And that is how Club 20 was born.
In this club, all you have to do is come as yourself; messy, confused and becoming. Think of this club as a space you come to hear from fellow 20 somethings about how they are existing in a dwindling financial country, about how they are tackling romantic relationships, how they are holding onto friendships, their self-discovery journeys and most importantly, how they are building lives that are irrevocably and irrefutably theirs.
Don’t worry, there are no bouncers in this club. And every first and third Wednesday of the month, I’ll be your MC. See you soon.