A couple of months ago I was sitting on the roof of my friend’s house with a couple of friends just watching the sunset and chatting about life, and my friend said something that I have not been able to stop thinking about. He was talking about how crazy it is that we are growing up and how sometimes time feels like it’s moving so fast that it’s honestly scary — something I have also been feeling recently as I step into young adulthood. He mentioned that as he is stepping into this new era of his life, essentially adulthood now, it is forcing him to re-evaluate the things that truly make him happy. Within re-evaluating comes the hard truth of accepting that there are things that he has to let go of as they do not serve him anymore. This struck me because it made me realize that I haven’t had a moment of introspection to examine the things that make me happy at this point in my life. I think this comes from a place of not focusing on the present but rather being stuck in the past or worrying about the future(something that I’m working on). But after listening to him talk about reevaluating the things that are important to him, it made me really think about what made me happy in the past as a contrast to what I think would make me happy now, which is something that I didn’t know would be so impactful in my life right now.
Looking back at my late teen years, I can acknowledge the things that made me happy and can appreciate how they served me during that era of my life. Ideas, people, and things that held value at that point in my life, that kept me grounded through the darkest of days. And although some things remain with me, the hard truth is that many are not serving me in the same way anymore. Friendships that are just not as prominent in my life anymore, ideas that evolved as I grew into a new version of myself, and things that simply don’t bring me the same joy that they did a couple of years ago. But that’s growing up, isn’t it? Constant evolution into newer, stronger, and better versions of ourselves while not forgetting the past versions of ourselves that helped us get there. As my friends and I step into the scary new territory of our twenties, we are saying goodbye to the aspects of our life that carried us to this point but don’t serve us anymore, while welcoming a whole new world of things that bring us happiness, with the hope that we thrive in the unknown.