Twenty-Twenty.

It is a strange task, documenting your twenties. There is a constant tension of expression. Which words do you chose to publish? and which to discard and remain scribbles in a diary tucked away from prying eyes? Do you lay bare the anxieties and angst characteristic of your teenage years - still present; a small rippling lake in your chest, occasionally churning (unsoothed even by new successes, conquests and triumphs)? Do you write of love or material things? The new lipstick or mascara? ... Or is it the bittersweetness of seeing new couples snuggled up on park benches late at night - more sweet than bitter, but still there lingers that tang of loneliness on your tongue. Do you allude to years of overwrought poetry, florid prose and misquoted song lyrics? Or do you write of the successes of youth? That first internship, a first car, house, the latest sexual conquest? And what do these amount to eventually? These stepping stones to 'adulthood' mere convenient excuses to claim bragging rights on a public forum. Or do you write of mundane things? Small daily experiences. People you've met, places you've eaten at.... the large man who all but sat on me as I write this on the bus home.

There is a strangeness in writing this as someone who is at the end of their first year of their twenties. There is always a restlessness, a need to do something, feel something, indeed, to write something and place it in a public forum. Some of my older friends tell me that this will pass, that you learn to be comfortable with your own company, that you settle, that stressing the little things will pass. Perhaps. Who am I to say? Although more and more, I hope that this is not the case - that this restlessness will not pass. Surely it is the restlessness, the need to constantly be doing, living, learning that drives us forward. Even if we aren't physically doing, the act of thinking, planning, stressing (because let's face it, that's what we all do when left alone to our own thoughts) drives us to do and to be and to reflect. And doesn't growth come with self-reflection? Perhaps that is the core of our twenties: to be: to daydream, to make plans, to be impulsive, to do one thing but believe another. And thus to write about it makes any prolonged process: a blog, diary, whatever, look like the lovechild of Keats and Nick Cave... but with more photographs of what you're eating and wearing.
No matter how we chose to document it though, the twenties are the years for adventure, for contradiction, for no regrets, for love and freedom.

Just please, for the love of god, stop writing about lipstick.