Before I get into anything: I might say ‘year’ more than I should. Unless explicitly stated, I’m referring to the 12-month period after I turned a certain age, not January 1st to December 31st.
While riding around I had the idea of looking back on my twenties and just, rambling a little bit about them. Important events, ups, downs, that sort of thing. Expect this to take awhile to come out and be just about the most uninteresting thing one could read on this website. Seriously, if you want to read something more interesting, try that art project movie where it’s six hours of a wall. But I’ll write it anyway because I’m finding it pretty cathartic.
In short? My 20’s fucking sucked. At 21, I lost my mind and started spiraling into intense depression that led me to quit my student job, move back to my mother’s house, drop out of university after flunking two semesters, no-showing one, and transferring to my old community college and no-showing that one. In 2018 I moved to my father’s house in order to make some kind of a change, any change so that I didn’t end up a NEET by 30. Then I got gallstones and got my gallbladder taken out, being hospitalized twice in a month. Then I confronted the buried, latent trauma of familial abandonment and other issues until an opportunity arose: I could go to school as a resident student in New York!
Wait, no. But I could move back to my mother’s and return to school, all expenses covered! Wait, yes to the first part but no to the second. But it worked out in the end. I’m still fucked up but at least I know how to articulate it, laugh at it and not let it dominate my mind. I may be unemployed and not seeking education when the age clock ticks over again, but at least this time the unemployment will just be due to industries crumbling under the weight of generative AI we’re all unprepared for.
I started 20 off really well, all things considered. I was doing well in my major at university, I had a student job that paid minimum wage, but was easy enough to study while fulfilling its duties. I got up in the morning, went to work, then went to school and finished off the day with my responsibilities completed.
I’d go to my rented apartment all but adjacent to campus, typically to a crock pot of food that’s been cooking since morning and eat a nice meal. In the winter, I’d turn on the wall heater so my cat Pen Pen could warm up. In the summer, she’d want to go outside on the patio, so I’d sit outside with her until she came back to my lap. When the day got late, I’d put on some TV or a movie. Occasionally, I’d play YouTube videos on my custom-built home theater PC.
Really, the only bad thing that happened was when I got bedbugs. To this day I still wake up when I feel the slightest crawling on my skin, or if I hallucinate a shadow creeping across the wall.
