My Late Twenties Confidence

Audio version available here.

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In some aspects, I’ve quite often felt like an older man in a younger person’s body. Perhaps it comes from learning one of the harsher realities of life from an early age. Or maybe it comes from developing an introspective mind. Or perhaps I’m just an idiot who thinks too much. But the fact of the matter is, I often catch myself ruminating on life as if I’m a scant few years from the end of it, rather than a fistful of decades.

On my walk home from work tonight I was thinking about human personality as a spectrum from “thinker” to “doer”. Now, I’m not saying that thinkers don’t do or that doers don’t think. Maybe most people exist in a healthy middle ground of both. But I’m certainly a little too far along the thinker end of this spectrum that I’ve just made up. I think myself in circles until I’m too dizzy to do.

That being said, I came here today to write about self acceptance. My reason for having such an introspective evening is that I was thinking back on my twenties so far, and comparing them against the rest of my life. I’ve still two years to live of this decade, but so far it’s looking like the general theme of this chapter in my life has been self acceptance. I hear a lot about how you spend your twenties figuring yourself out, and I think that comes from leaving education and leaving the established social routine for the first time in life. Who are we outside of school, outside of teenage society, with its hierarchy of popularity established through pre-empathetic judgements?

For me, I spent a lot of time in school being picked on and a lot of time afterwards telling myself I hadn’t had it that bad. But the more I age, the more I consider how I react to certain situations, the more I realise how damaging of an effect it is to be constantly told you’re not funny, not worth listening to, and being spun into the butt of every joke. As an adult, that has manifested in me as social anxiety, and paranoia that people are purposefully ignoring me if they don’t respond to messages. Even when my rational brain is able to assess my feelings as irrational and realise where they come from, it’s still a struggle to deal with.

The further away I get from school, though, the more confident I grow. There’s always that small, nagging part of me that worries about being the whelp of the social group, or gets irrationally defensive about “losing” a snark-off. But slowly over the years, I’ve come to realise that I’m quite universally liked at work. I’m not the weird outcast kid who makes jokes that need vetting from the popular kids before people are allowed to laugh anymore. And with that kind of power, the jerks who do come along hold less sway over me by being jerks. Suddenly, I’m not the weirdo for having my own hobbies and brand of humour, they’re the weirdo for taking exception to it.

Well… most of the time, at least. Turns out I’ve been cursed with a feeble human brain, and lessons learned aren’t always applied, depending on the day. Generally speaking, though, I feel like I’m changing as a person as I approach my thirties, becoming more myself than ever before. I have my limits, but those boundaries are moving and I’m feeling happier for the breathing room.

Before you head off, a quick note. Due to the creation of my writing blog, Excepts From A Multifarious Mind, I have also spun up a YouTube channel named Kritigri Writes. There, I post audio versions of my short stories. I’m now thinking of posting audio versions of these blogs posts there, too, so go subscribe if you haven’t already! There’s no audio version of this blog post at the time of publication as it’s currently 1am, but keep an eye out.