What 20 Somethings Can Take from 2020
On December 31, 2019, my friends and I stood barefoot in puddles of champagne on the floor of a Wrigleyville apartment. We counted down to the start of the new year — a new decade — for our roaring twenties. We clinked glasses, and kissed each other on the lips. That night, we fell asleep inches apart from one another on air mattresses sprawled across the room.
We expected the new year to be monumental for each of us. We were going to move to bigger cities, start our careers, take our first vacations together and maybe meet someone special along the way. 2020 would be the year our stories began to take shape. And they did. But not at all like we had envisioned.
What actually happened was quite the opposite. We lost jobs, moved home to our parents’ houses, went through breakups and still haven’t figured out how to date in the age of social distancing. Our stories are taking shape in a way we never could have pictured.
I was an optimistic, bright-eyed, single 24-year-old in March when I started a new job, signed a lease and moved to a new city. Then, coronavirus hit the U.S. and I was laid off before the ink dried on my business cards. I didn’t even have a couch. So you can imagine the identity crisis I was experiencing one July morning as I sat on the only chair in my empty apartment, panic-scrolling LinkedIn for job openings when I came across a post that stopped me in my tracks. It was a quote from the book Life Is In the Transitions by Bruce Feiler. It moved me so much that I ordered the book on the spot. It said this: “Being in a state of in between means being in some state of loneliness. Being neither here nor there often feels like being nowhere.”
That was it. Someone finally explained the feeling. Being nowhere. For twenty-somethings, this year has been one long limbo period during what should be the most exciting time of our life.
Growing up, we were taught to equate movement with progress. Our parents led us to believe progress meant happiness and pushed us to strive for it at every turn. So it’s not surprising that our age group is full of busy bodies. We’re constantly dreaming up our next cross-country move, starting a side hustle, and climbing the corporate ladder. You can find us where the action is. Missing out? We wouldn’t dream of it. We coined the term FOMO, after all. So what are twenty-somethings doing in a time when doing nothing is the best thing to do?
For starters, we’ve rewired our thinking. We had to unlearn the rules our parents and teachers drilled into our heads. Get good grades. Go to college. Get a high-paying job. We followed the rules and it landed us here. Unemployed with a negative net worth. We had to release ourselves from the pressure to achieve goals that were no longer an option. We considered that maybe they were never ours in the first place. We realized we can’t rely on external validation — a promotion at work, likes on that picture we posted from vacation, those gold stars we love seeing next to our name — we love so much to make us feel good about our place in the world, especially now that we’ve seen how fickle they can be. We had to let go of the picture of our lives to which we’d grown so attached. As we came to terms with the new reality, we saw that picture might never be anything more than an illusion, and we had to start dreaming up something different.
In his book, Feiler says, “One of the keys to getting the most out of our transitions — and our lives in general — is to understand our lives as stories.”
I had a lot of time to think about the story arc of my life during the three months I was unemployed. Pre-pandemic, I dreamt of moving to a new city and living out my own personal coming of age novel. I envisioned outfits I’d never have the nerve to wear. A late-night poetry slam. Stolen glances at a busy coffee shop. But my plot was derailed by an unprecedented global event. None of us had “Chapter 12: Quarantine” in our outline (talk about a rough draft).
The “stories” theme popped up a lot in 2020. At the beginning of July, Hamilton was released on Disney+ and everyone spent the weekend crying to “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”. Then, Taylor Swift dropped a surprise album titled “folklore”, which Swift herself described as “a collection of stories”. Journaling has had a major moment this year. And, while there’s a multitude of reasons for the stories trend, the timeless truth is this: stories give us something to hold onto when we’re standing on shaky ground.
In her review of Feiler’s book, Arianna Huffington said this:
“Because life transitions are a break in our narrative, they also give us a chance to reflect on them, tend to them and ‘fix the plot holes in our life stories.’ Feiler writes that transitions are ‘an autobiographical occasion, when we simply must take the opportunity to revisit, revise, and ultimately restart our internal autobiographies, making some tweaks, adding a new chapter or two, elevating or devaluing certain themes.’”
The pandemic has created an undeniable break in the narrative of our stories. But, because it has given us pause, it has also given us opportunity to reflect on our themes and, if we’re paying attention, make some necessary adjustments.
This year, the theme of freedom appeared on a grand scale; in news headlines and across social media, on picket signs and in petitions. I realized how narrow my understanding of freedom was. I usually think of freedom in the way you’d expect someone like me to…Lana del Rey on a motorcycle, keeping a journal in my backpack at all times, looking longingly out of airplane windows pretending I’m in a music video. You get my point. If I’m being honest, most of my themes looked like that at the start of 2020. I wanted to have an adventure. I wanted to do something that I’d love to talk about when I’m 60 and reliving the glory days with my friends around the brunch table. I wanted to have a great story.
So, taking Feiler’s advice, I reexamined what that meant. Freedom is choosing what to do with our time, and going where we want when we want to, yeah, but it’s more than that. And if there’s one thing this year has taught me, it’s that freedom is like time. It’s fleeting. A lot of us think we have more than we do. We waste a lot of it. And even if we have more than enough of it today, it could all be taken away tomorrow.
“People are pulling away from formal institutions,” Feiler continues, “but they’re not giving up on these core questions about who am I, how do I get through difficult times in my life, what does it mean to have values, how can I serve my community and is there a higher calling in some way.”
As we examine our themes, let’s challenge ourselves to look at them through the lens of community. I believe that’s the challenge 2020 has given us. How do we look out for one another? What can we do differently for our neighbors? Our city? How can we make use of our time to better build our own characters while playing a positive role in someone else’s story?
I still want to look back when I’m 60 and think I was cool in my twenties. More than that, I want to think I was introspective; that I made the most of this moment and allowed the challenge to change me. I want to know that I was intentional; that I thought about how today’s page would set the stage for the next chapter, and what that chapter might become in the story arc of a life well-lived. What traits did I aim to embody? What would my actions need to be to demonstrate those qualities? How do those actions align with my values? What are my values?
I can still move across the country, and maybe I will someday. But because of this year and what it has done to my mind and my heart, I know that the greatest, most exciting and timeless story I can write for my life is one that isn’t about me. This year has been the biggest plot twist a lot of us have ever experienced, but it’s an opportunity to shift the narrative. It’s a challenge to reexamine our major themes so that, when we reach the final page, our story is one we wrote with intention; one that we want to read.
Everyone I know has struggled this year — emotionally, financially, physically, and mentally. I’m not searching for a silver lining and I don’t think anyone is obligated to look at this year through rose-tinted glasses. We don’t have to think it was meant to teach us a lesson. It can just be an unfortunate event that was made worse by human error. And it can be as simple as that. But we can still admit that it has changed us. At the very least, given us pause, given us a chapter we didn’t intend to write. This year will come to an end, and this chapter will only be a small piece of the grand narrative. But, if we use this moment to reflect, it can be the chapter that changes the rest of the story, and maybe even for the better.
