By Collette Kianes Lang
The Croft Magazine // I’m trying to find a new balance of ‘semi-floating’. Trying to mix the two narratives of ‘You’re only in your 20s’ – the time to make mistakes, have fun and be selfish – and ‘You’re in your 20s now time to think about your future, budget your spending and get your life together.
But I find comfort in the idea that no one knows what they want to do, that we are all floating through life side by side. There’s a word for this. It’s sonder
It’s a Saturday night and I look around as I and my four flatmates squish on our one un-comfy sofa. A laptop has taken up residence on the coffee table for a large part of the afternoon. It has gone from playing Real Housewives of New York to some programme about cocktails. One of us is knitting, another checking emails, another mending a hole in a pair of jeans and the other two half-watching the programme. We’re hungover and quite recently the idea of two nights in a row has begun to lose its appeal.
This is the start of round two of our coming of age. The Twenties.
I have woken up and the internal questions have started. What am I going to do with my life? I don’t know. How should I structure my day? I don’t know. What on earth should I make myself for dinner? I don’t know. Will I know the answer to these questions at the end of my 20s? Probably not.
From leaving school up until my third year at university I have ‘floated’. Covid didn’t help. With everything being shut down and lectures online there wasn’t much to do but float through the months. For me, time kind of paused.
Except that it never did. So, now I’m two years older, people around me are thinking about careers and I have said goodbye to 2½ years of rent money that I will never see again. I can’t remember the last time I woke up at 8 am and the schedule that I fulfilled at school seemed an exhausting number of hours of work I could never do now.
I’m trying to find a new balance of ‘semi-floating’. Trying to mix the two narratives of ‘You’re only in your 20s’ – the time to make mistakes, have fun and be selfish – and ‘You’re in your 20s now time to think about your future, budget your spending and get your life together.
My mum once told me, as I panicked about whom I was going to be, ‘I still don’t know what I want to be when I’m older. Maybe that line was just a throwaway for her, but I have taken great comfort in it. I sometimes forget that my parents or important people in my life have whole lives that I’m not privy to. Despite my mum guiding me through so much, a person who seems busy all day every day and has a CV full of triumphs and jobs, she still doesn’t know.
Maybe it’s scary that our lives may never feel whole or complete. There will always be questions to which the only answer we can offer is ‘I don’t know. To me, it’s reassuring. All those people who inspire me or guide me. When they finish teaching me, when they finish writing their words in a book I love or press stop on recording the podcast that inspired me, their life continues: in many ways, like mine, filled with questions and the unknown.
There’s a word for this. It’s sonder– the realization that everyone around you, even strangers, have complex lives. And they must constantly be dealing with those complexities, whether you’re aware of them or not.
As I continue through my 20s and question what is next, I take comfort in the idea of sonder. For every mistake and every worry which I think is only mine, there’s someone out there who can relate to it. Because other people’s lives are complex and difficult too.
Sonder humanises people in a world that tries to portray so much as perfect. But I also understand that it can be isolating. It reminds us that parts of our lives will always be untouchable and incomprehensible to others, and vice versa.
So: back to me and my flatmates squished on our sofa. Possibly, despite sharing the TV and company, our brains are all quietly filled with different worries about what’s to come. As well as a few that are the same. It doesn’t matter how many meals we have together, group trips or late-night conversations we share, the complexity of who we are, keeps us as concealed as the strangers I see on the streets.
Our 20s will continue. We will probably face many of the same hurdles – and find many ways to tackle them.
Yet, if we turn on the TV to Fleabag, Normal People, Everything I Know About Love or any other 20s coming-of-age show, we’d all relate to it. So would my mum, my lecturer, and that person I sat next to on the train yesterday. The Twenties are an era that everyone endures. The complexity of who we are may stay out of reach – to everyone else, and possibly even to ourselves. Yet if we break it down, we’re all relatable, following a path travelled by many before us. None of us is the same, but we are all human.
Featured Image: By Adam Liu
Human beings are complex, but beautiful.
