slew of words

hapless – adjective – having no luck : unfortunate

“Nobody likes you when you’re 23.” – Blink-182

Tale as old as 1999, gracing Instagram captions and being screamed by grunge-y cover bands everywhere. A line from a song that is treated as a joke until you are thrown full force into facing the reality that twenty three is a hapless year.

Up until this point your hand has been held, your dreams have been built, you are eager to fly. But nothing can mentally prepare you for the release, for the first little stumble or the first huge mistake. The one that snowballs into all of your combined doubts, fears, realizations… and the age of twenty three.

You learn that being considered an adult (even though you really don’t feel like one) is not nearly as fun or exciting as you thought it would be. Juggling the balance of a full-time schedule, a neverending to-do list, and your sanity feels impossible. You start seeing college students on the street, so naive and full of life, and just want to shake them into appreciating, savoring, this time in their lives more.

You learn the weight that feeling lonely can carry. All of your friends are no longer within a five mile radius, and they will only continue to get farther and farther away. And making adult friends is hard, scary and intimidating, and that song lyric acts as your only warning.

You learn that sometimes people just suck. That you can be communicative, an open book that is optimistic to all possibilities, but that the favor is not always returned. And that no matter how much you do or how much you care, you can never force someone to treat you with respect.

You learn that so much of yourself relies on mental stability. So at first you don’t understand why some days you physically cannot move out of bed to do the things you enjoy doing. You blame yourself, believe something is wrong with only you and that no one else experiences this. Until you grasp that this is just going to be a part of your life now, and that neglecting to acknowledge it makes it worse.

You learn that adults are not as smart as you always thought. Which is not to say the adults in your life have not been valuable, or wise, but that everyone in this world seems to just be crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. An uncomfortable, and ground shaking, perception.

You learn that not only does nobody like you when you’re twenty three, but sometimes you don’t like you either. Constantly scrutinizing in front of the mirror, trying to overcompensate physically for the emotional voids you may be facing. Then reminding yourself that looks fade, which is terrifying on days your outer appearance seems to be the only thing holding you together.

But I keep telling myself that this quarter life crisis is inevitable, healthy even. And that sometimes you need to be knocked down completely in order to gain perspective and build yourself back up again, better this time. So do your worst twenty four, twenty three has prepared us for anything you could throw our way.