My birthday was Saturday and I turned 20! Which means I am finally an adult. I should be happy, I mean I’ve only dreamt about being in my 20’s living on my own since I was 8 years old. I always imagined I would be living on my own in a cute apartment in the city, with a perfect boyfriend and I would be a CEO of some fashion business. So, you can probably guess, life is not how I imagined it would be when I turned 20.
I’m still in college, although I’ll be graduating in just over a year and then I have to really figure life out. I have a wonderful boyfriend, though I would not describe our relationship as “perfect”, but it is pretty close. I do not live in an apartment, but I live on campus with one of my best friends in a “suite” which is basically a small apartment without a kitchen.
I would say the past two decades have blessed me tremendously. I was born into a wonderful, loving family and have been blessed with the ability to get a great education backed by so many amazing people supporting me. I have so many friends who shower me with love everyday and I have been able to get through all of my rough patches in life with their help.
I can only imagine what the next two decades will have to offer me, although I’m not sure if it will be as easy as the last two. Graduating college seems very scary to me; having to get a job and support myself is a scary thing. The pressure of society pushing people my age to marry and have children is a constant weight on my shoulders. I want to be successful and make my family proud and I want to break through the glass ceiling. None of this will be easy.
So, let’s start with graduating and making a career for myself. I am not sure what I want to do with my degree exactly, but I have narrowed it down. Right now, I am working as the Social Media Director for a non-profit here in Cincinnati. I enjoy working with social media, planning calendars, and measuring strategies, but it is not as challenging as I had hoped it would be. I would love to work in PR or be a writer of some sort in the future. I have been applying for internships and jobs in these fields to figure out if that will be the challenge I am looking for. I plan on doing a few more co-ops, then figuring out which path I truly want to take.
I am not someone who likes to stay in one place for a long period of time, so finding a career that I want to stay in for years might be impossible for me. I think being a freelance writer would be a fun career and I would be able to work on my own terms and change up what I want to write about. I am a better writer than I am speaker, and I just feel like writing is my passion, If I could do it in a way that I do not get burned out, that would be a dream.
Finding a career that I love and being successful at it is the most important thing to me. However, there is this stigma in our society that in our 20’s we have to get married and begin having a family. I hate that. So many people from my high school are married and having kids and when my mom was my age she was already married and had me. It’s almost like society doesn’t want us to focus on ourselves and become the best we can be. I want to have a successful career and be able to support myself before I even begin to think about marriage, let alone having children.
Like many other women today, I do not feel the need to get married or have children at all. I want to prove that being a wife or mother does not define who a woman is. Our careers and life choices should define who we are as people, not societal gender roles. I don’t want to turn this into a feminist rant, but, I am not about to put my career on hold to follow the stigma of getting married young.
I think my 20’s will be the most life changing years of my life. I hope they are challenging, fun, and promising. I want to be able to make the most out of the next decade, break barriers, and succeed in life. I have worked so hard already and I will continue to do so until I have met all of my life goals, no matter how much time and effort it takes. I hope I can continue to share this journey with you all.
Sydney
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Shit Sydney Says 