20 :)

I turn 20 next month and getting to step into a whole new decade has me feeling a lot more than usual.

It’s how I imagine it always goes: you spend your whole life anticipating the day you will become a teenager (because that’s cool apparently) and it only takes the blink of an eye to arrive on the other side.

20 feels so big. But it’s also just 20.

It’s big because you’ve now lived long enough to tell someone, “Hey, we’ve been friends for over a decade.”

You’re old enough to have loved some people longer than you lived without knowing them.

And what a gift it is — to have someone so inextricably linked to who you’re becoming — to not know who you’d be without them.

And for them to have loved (and tolerated) all the versions of you and still, after all this time, want to be around you.

20 is old enough to know that people leave, but young enough to believe it when they promise they’ll be in your life forever, young enough to be in blissful oblivion of all that’s yet to come.

20 is not yet old enough to accept that to live is to lose and hurt more than you ever thought possible.

You’re 20 and hoping for an easy ride whilst knowing that the decade to come will break your heart as much as the one gone by.

But you’re 20 now, old enough to have the comfort of knowing you survived.

You have lived enough to see the ways in which you are better for it.

You love life enough to do it again.

There’s a whole list of things you thought you would have achieved by now, but you’re 20 and you have the promise of a whole life ahead of you.

You’re 20, old enough to know how precarious that promise is.

But you’re just 20, so you’re happy to have it anyway.

You used to think that growing older was a birthright, but you’re 20 now, and it feels like a privilege to have made it this far.