Sex and the City didn’t say it best.  They captured the life of a twenty-something perfectly, by ignoring it.  Carrie and company were the acting manual for dating, sex and living luxuriously in Manhattan, but failed to fictionally show us how to do these things at 24 and more importantly, how to survive being 24 in a sane, sober way.  I’m not about to try and write the manual, but as a reference guide for girls, guys and nostalgic 30-somethings with developing crows feet, here is what being a 24-year-old female feels like.

1. It totally sucks. There are good days, but they are numbered. There is no certainty that a good mood will stick around and frankly, most good moods come from transient shit like weather and new furniture. When a 24-year-old is in a good mood, she knows it’s not going to last, which consequently summons bad mood fever and an insane fear of having that icky, vacant, depressed feeling that we’ve become closer to this month’s bff.
2. Every day is a new question layered on top of 24,000 open-ended questions. We are lacking emotional stamina and have to make decisions, like, stat. We are so tired from feeling gross, that we are too exhausted to actually deal with it and then are smacked in the face with another really huge question or super-imposed decision that’s too complicated for us to even wrap our heads around. 24-year-old girls are in constant “big-question” debt, so much so, that our little green friend, envy drops by and we start living vicariously through fictional characters on campy tv shows like Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Mother (I can’t believe I’d admit that. The laugh track on that show is out of control. It’s like they know their writing isn’t clever enough so they try and zombie their audience into getting the pun when we’re too focused on real issues, like how Marshall and Lilly are so annoying and we’d never be friends with a couple that walked around whimpering pet names and love haikus to each other). But their apartment is nice and how the fuck did they get so happy?
3. We get sad and have no one to talk to because our elders are over our bitching and our peers are in the same sinking boat. OK…so Carrie was always questioning relationships and writing articles that would never make her a living had she been a real person and Miranda was a hard ass, firey red head who had been through some shit and Samantha was a free spirit with the occasional dash of sentimental Hallmark and Charlotte owed Hallmark. They talked through their age-appropriate problems all the time, so much so, that if you’ve ever attempted to watch more than three episodes in a row, you feel drunk and like you’ve lost all knowledge obtained in college. The point is, they had all been in different shaped boats that either sunk or remained afloat for a variety of different reasons. Us 24-year-olds have nothing to compare 24 to, so when a friend comes hunting for advice or motivation or Vicodin, we’re all out because we’ve guzzled every bit to fix our own shit.
4. The world moves so crazy insane-insane crazy fast these days that we prioritize faking a smile and a public persona over who we actually are on that particular day. A 24-year-old girl is constantly grappling with questions like, “Who the fuck am I? Should I cut my hair? Am I too old for this nipple ring? Has my metabolism started to slow down? GYM MEMBERSHIP???” Hard to believe we’ve been here 24 years and still have no idea how to live sometimes. So, instead of figuring it out, 24-year-olds fear being cut off from things, especially social things, so we swarm to events and outings where everyone seems so goddamn confident. Part of us wonders what they have that we don’t, and another part of us mooches off of that vibe and acts super confident. Our public selves are chic and social, but our private selves are kind of on to something here. We are half-certain that other twenty-somethings are only acting that way because they feel they have to and that by acting super quirky and dorky and whatevery, they are somehow avoiding everything else. While they have public panic attacks advertised through social media, you feel super weird about ever doing that and shut off the computer. A 24-year-old girl tries to bake or learn to cook vegetarian for a week, but in no time, she’s back out at the parties and get-togethers and all that good stuff, wondering how she got there and more importantly how she looks.
5. Finally…Relationships. There is a huge difference between an actual healthy relationship and not being particularly fit for a healthy relationship. When a 24-year-old girl is in a really healthy, happy relationship, she is happy, but she’s so swamped with all the other work she has to do on herself, it makes her emotional and crazy. She is confident she’s the most insecure person in the entire universe and that her boyfriend will meet someone better. She constantly questions if she likes how she looks in the mirror and by default, figures she just doesn’t look or feel good that day and that she probably has a brain tumor. A 24-year-old had been single for so long before she met her now long-term boyfriend that she doesn’t want to do anything to fuck it up. She thinks, “My mom had me at this age. She had a house and a mortgage and a fucking baby. I have $200 in the bank and can only speak one language.” She feels underwhelmed with her accomplishments and that she’s going to be that girl who has a long-term boyfriend until she’s 28, only to discover that he doesn’t want to marry her or something because of how crazy she was throughout her early 20s. A 24-year-old girl worries so intensely about the future, she single-handedly sabotages it.

But then a 24-year-old girl goes out for a walk and it’s fall and the air smells really nice and she’s listening to Fleetwood Mac. While standing at a crosswalk, a bus zips by and hits a car making a left hand turn. A 24-year-old girl is shocked and calls the police and stands around and is scared, but curious if there’s blood or brains on the ground. There is a mass of onlookers and she feels she’s done her part by reporting the accident. She has to be somewhere. At 24, she realizes that life is a tightrope walk over some serious shit, like car wrecks or having a brain tumor or something. Today, a 24-year-old feels thankful, confused or not, because she knows one day she’ll be 30-something and wondering why she didn’t embrace 24 more. One day, she hopes to have some answers, but in the meantime, she’s going to look both ways before she crosses the street.