Cork Views: Nobody told me this about life in your twenties

This year marks my sixth year out of secondary school education - I was six years in, and now I’m six years out - and I’m still undecided as to whether six years really is a long time.

I never really thought about my twenties when I was a teenager. I had a lot going on that didn’t grant me time or energy to look ahead, and adulthood seemed like a far-off concept I wouldn’t be able to comprehend until I was in it. I was right about that.

I pictured the world as one big secondary school that everyone eventually got used to. Just as getting from classroom to classroom by myself and learning to juggle my timetable in a massive new environment had become easier over time, I imagined my twenties would be an easier adjustment. I was wrong about that.

The world does somewhat resemble a secondary school from here - there are unspoken expectations, social hierarchies, and a different kind of uniform. One that is more of a line of interchanging masks; for work, for friends, for family, for your doctor.

I’m not a stranger to masking socially, but it’s a lot more complex in your twenties given the circumstances.

If secondary school is a heavily manned structure leading to the finish line, your twenties is like an ever-branching system of roads that you mostly build yourself. Except nobody taught you how to build roads, and there is no finish line.

You keep driving because you can legally do that now, and watch everyone you know start to diverge off on their own roads. Some get a headstart, and some do not.

There is no teacher to report this to. Everyone silently acknowledges this is not fair and continues on.

Measuring progress is quickly considered invalid, but is still impossible not to do in between break-downs.

I enjoy the absurdity of it sometimes, seeing friends getting married, raising children, joining the army, emigrating, holidaying, and the rarest one - the incredulity of seeing announcements that they’ve bought a home.

The majority of this information is relayed to you via the internet, so you only catch glimpses of the people you grew up with through a visor.

You don’t see the stress of the mortgages, the sleepless nights with newborns, the culture shock of living on a different continent, or the 16 hours spent interrailing between stunning holiday views.

I’m no hypocrite; I do the exact same thing online by only posting the ‘good’ parts, having realised long ago that social media is similar to a virtual scrapbook.

Hearing a friend give you the full story over coffee feels like having the context behind a picture in the family photo album re-explained.

There’s a lot of coffee. Between work, looking after your own basic needs, and making time for your hobbies, seeing friends becomes something scheduled four weeks in advance, and it is nearly always grabbing a quick coffee.

There’s a lot of pretending, too. Sorting out your insurance, maintaining a straight face with your GP, developing your best friendly co-worker smile, meeting grief more often.

You realise that you can withstand a lot more than you thought you could, that there is a firm limit to the amount of anger or sadness you can hold at one time, and how to yank yourself back up over and over.

Everyone is a bit of an anxious freelancer regardless of their profession when starting off - teachers hoping they’ll get substitute hours, journalists hoping their pitches go through, interns coming out of graduate programmes and hoping something will follow.

Very few are able to directly use the degrees they fought so hard to get at 17, but you also had no idea what you might want for your adult self at that time. It’s terrifying, but you’ve also never been so free to restart, as terrifying or weirdly shameful as that feels.

Maybe ‘doing well’ in your twenties looks like someone who is managing the best that they can, who cries sometimes but who can also laugh at their own annoyance at the price of a meal deal increasing. Priorities change.

You are so young but so old simultaneously, buying cheap wine but insisting on branded teabags, excitedly visiting toy shops but still not buying because you can’t afford it now, either.

Nobody prepared you for this, but how anyone could is beyond you.

So you turn your white top blue in the wash. You laugh at the insults from school bullies who never changed who now just resemble angry gnomes. You wish for better but thank God because you know now that it could be so much worse. You read the news and attempt to weigh up the pros and cons of voting for the politicians available. You spend an unfortunate amount on a match or concert ticket because experiences to look forward to are worth their weight in gold. Mistakes become funny stories.

You hate it here because of the mould in your shared rented house, but you love it here where you have the unexplained stamina to continue functioning while hungover on three hours of sleep.

You miss the structure of school that you were trained from infancy to follow, but you also couldn’t be paid to go back to a period of such black and white thinking.

Your twenties are a decade of contradictions and learning to trust yourself while freefalling.

There is still no finish line, but your thirties scare you less, depending on the time of day.