he ‘ought’ to be feeling a certain way and doing certain things in his twenties. The other was the significance he attributed to change, at a time when many of us are negotiating not only salaries and rent deposits but relationships with partners and families too. We are half child, half adult, with a foot in both camps. We lack the innocence and irresponsibility of childhood but most of us don’t yet have the skills to navigate adulthood because our identities are still being shaped.
I was born in 1978 and am a classic Generation X-er. My mother was part of a 70s generation who fought feminist battles for their children’s future, but who also belonged to a traditional domestic set-up where the lion’s share of household duties – including raising children – fell to the women. When I went to my all-girls secondary school I was taught that I was not defined by my biology. In fact, the majority of my sex education (such as it was) was focused almost entirely on the importance of not getting pregnant before you had established yourself in your career.
So I entered my twenties with a series of mixed messages. I knew it was important to forge a professional path. But I also expected to be married before the decade was out. I think that’s why I kept finding myself in serious relationships, rather than having a more relaxed attitude to intimacy, and it’s also why my twenties were pretty busy and stressful: not only was I trying to carve out the perfect career, but I was also attempting to nail down a perfect romantic partnership. As time went on, I felt I was failing at both. I was impatient for everything to be sorted and I didn’t realise that your twenties are a time of transition, of flux and that being in the change is the point of them.
As a result, I struggled.
For millennials, who entered the job market at precisely the time the 2008 global financial crisis struck, it must be even worse. They have been brought up in a hyper-connected age where everything from dating to grocery shopping can be done online, where contemporaries are boasting about their amazing lives on social media, where rents are high, property prices astronomical and where job insecurity is rife. There’s a scene in Lena Dunham’s Girls, the millennial sitcom of choice, in which Dunham goes in to get tested for an STD and her gynaecologist sighs, ‘You couldn’t pay me enough to be twenty-four again.’ Dunham’s response is, ‘Well, they’re not paying me at all.’
But some things are universal whatever generation you belong to. Most of us will experience the loss of loved ones in our twenties. My maternal grandfather, to whom I was very close, died in my second year at university. When I was twenty-three, that beloved former boyfriend who kept eating all the food I bought, was killed in Iraq where he had gone as a freelance journalist to cover the conflict. It was a shock from which I have yet to recover and I suspect it’s the kind of shock from which one never does. A few years later, a colleague of mine who battled with alcoholism was found dead on the floor of his flat. I lost my paternal grandmother shortly afterwards. Many of us will have similar stories: your twenties are often when you first come face to face with mortality, with the sense that all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, running out of time.
It was the decade I first went into therapy. My friend (also in her twenties) passed on the number of her therapist and when I called, the phone rang out and clicked into voicemail. I had intended to leave a short message with my details but ended up gulping back the tears while I tried to explain what was happening in my life, all the time being hamstrung by British politeness and a sense that I was being terribly self-indulgent.
‘I’m not exactly where I want to be professionally,’ I said. I was standing in the corridor of my office when I made the call, surrounded by copies of old newspapers and the sound of the ladies’ lavatory door clanging shut. ‘It would be great if you were able to see me.’
For the next three months, I went to an office in a red-brick house in Queen’s Park, north-west London, every Wednesday morning before work. My therapist was an attractive woman in her late forties with shoulder-length greying hair and a penchant for statement Bakelite necklaces. She would open the door to me when I arrived and not say anything to me beyond a cursory hello, and I would follow her up the stairs trying to make agonising small talk until I realised after a few weeks that there was no point in trying to charm her. The awkward silence was part of the therapy. It was about making me feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. It was about making me choose honesty without worrying about what she would think of me and whether she would like me or not.
Her therapy room was kitted out, as I have since discovered, like almost every therapy room I’ve ever been in: anonymous Ikea furniture, a generic pot-plant, a box of tissues on a low table and a subtly placed clock so that you can see when your session is coming to an end. Within those four walls, I made some interesting discoveries. One of them was that your twenties could be a ‘gestation period’.
My therapist would couch her opinions in a series of questions, designed to make me feel I’d cleverly come to conclusions about my own behaviour by myself. And so it was that one day, she said: ‘Do you think that maybe, you’ve been through quite a lot already and been operating at a fairly frantic pace, and that perhaps this is a necessary time of reflection, of allowing the next phase to hatch?’
It was an incredibly helpful moment. It allowed me to let go of some of the ‘oughts’ and the ‘shoulds’ that had been crowding out my thoughts, those shrill internal critics that were taunting me with the idea of what other people were doing and how I was failing to keep up. I relaxed a bit.
At my thirtieth birthday party, held in an upstairs room at my favourite pub with a playlist designed especially by me and full of 1990s hip-hop, I felt happy. In fact, I felt relieved to have made it through my twenties and relieved that I no longer had to worry about turning thirty. It was done. I was a little bit wiser. A little bit more self-aware. In a few months’ time, although I did not know it then, I would sell my first novel.
Looking back now, I suppose I would categorise my twenties as a decade of impatience, where I wanted to be at the mythical happy end point, but had to sort through a whole lot of stuff to get there. They were also a decade of worrying I wasn’t doing them right, that I wasn’t being footloose enough or responsible enough and that, caught in the unsatisfactory mid-point between the two, I was failing to make the most of them.
The author David Nicholls, who spent most of his twenties trying and failing to make it as an actor before turning his hand to writing, said that he now realised ‘there are ways out, that we’re not fixed at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, that life is long and you can try things for a while and if they don’t work out, do something else’.
But of course, it’s only when we’re older and have knocked about a bit that we can conclude there is no uncomplicatedly happy end point. There are a series of points – some happy, some sad, some simply quietly contented – and each one will be different from how we imagined it. Not better or worse; just different. And perhaps what surviving your twenties makes you realise is that life, after all, is texture.
‘I feel like I did it [my twenties], I committed to it,’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge said when I spoke to her about her own decade of transition. ‘I’d really like to have the skin from my twenties,’ she joked, ‘but I prefer my heart and my guts now.’
That’s the thing. Because however much you might feel you’re failing at your twenties when you’re living through them, they are a necessary crucible. Your twenties are spices in a pestle and mortar that must be ground up by life in order to release your fullest flavour. By the end of them, you’ll have more heart and more guts – and you’ll know never to roast broccoli again.
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