An Ode to my Twenties

I remember, when I was 21 years old, trying to think about the next few years and feeling this mix of dread and excitement; for a change, I had no clue what was going to happen. College had ended and I had no fixed plans of getting a job. I also knew marriage loomed somewhere on the horizon. All I had was a strong feeling that by the end of the next year life will have changed drastically. And it did.

And it’s true for all of us, isn’t it? The 20s are probably the most life changing - and thereby, the most personality changing - decade in our lives. If we were to actually list and think about all the new experiences we have in this decade, we’d be able to trace the evolution of our personalities. By the end of our 20s, most of us have experienced our first bad appraisal at work, our first serious disagreement with our parents, our first serious fight with the significant other, our first sole encounter with a client, our first serious blunder at work, …and most of them, in some small way, shape us. It’s fascinating.

At the end of the most life-changing decade of my life (so far!!), I look back and I wish I could reach out to the 21-year old that I was. I was right about things changing, but I had really, really, no clue how much was about to happen. I’m not saying that my experiences have been particularly rough…but life does have a way of uprooting us from our comfort zones. Where all the formulae the well-meaning people in our life give us don’t seem to solve it. Where, somehow, 2 and 2 don’t seem to add up to 4. Where our reactions are truly our own, without the expert filtering of parents and teachers, telling us the “correct” way to react. Where we, a lot of times, are stunned by what our reactions tell us about ourselves.

I can’t seem to let go of this crazy, scary, exciting time of my life without chronicling it in some way. So here is a list of “the things I learnt”. Note that I am not saying these are the “things I think every 21-year old should know”. We all learn our own, I think. And these are mine.

You make things happen: There is this book called “Celestine Prophecies” that talks about how we’re essentially fields of energy, and the deepest desires of our heart, and the thoughts we hold in our heads, attract events and people to us. Sounds fantastic, I know. But I also know that this is my truth. The direction my life has taken (or the direction that I’ve taken in my life) is pretty different from what seemed planned. And when I look back now, the only possible explanation for all the catalysts for this change – the people I met, the chance phone call that helped me decide that I would work (against parental opinion), the breaking up of relationships that made me feel so very lost and confused – seems to be that I attracted them in some way so I could achieve the highest truth I knew. I knew that a life lived actively and consciously was the only one worth living; I knew that I wanted to make my own mistakes, ask my questions, feel worthy of my life. And I also knew (somewhere, I guess) that the way my life was going then, I would have not been able to do any of this.

It’s important to know when it’s not about you: If I have to tell any body the most important thing about relationships, it would have to be this. And I’m talking about any relationship between two people – friends, siblings, spouses or families. Very often, especially in close relationships, we attribute any behaviour of the other person to ourselves. She’s frowning at me, he’s not coming to the dinner because it’s my parents, my kid brother’s not calling me often enough because we’re not such good friends any more, my mom-in-law hates me…we view our relationships, and therefore the people in them, as emanating from us. But is that the case? Whether the question is of rage that you don’t understand, or of indifference that you can’t seem to get through, it’s important to try and keep yourself out of the equation, and then evaluate it. If it is about you, try and fix it; but if it isn’t, don’t waste your breath, or more importantly, don’t try to change yourself. It may not help. Worse, it may spoil things further. Stay out until sanity reigns.

An important corollary to this learning has been this: while emotions are a good indicator for ourselves, they really are barriers to clear understanding.

Tough times make you tough, but they also take something out of you: Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” brings this out more poignantly than anything else. People who’ve been through really tough times are often not easily likeable. Or maybe I’m telling the story in reverse. If you were to scratch the surface on some of the aggressive, obnoxious, pushy people that we meet, you’d probably hear stuff that will pickle your soul. I guess all I’m saying is that everyone has the reason for being the way they are. Well, there are some losers, but let’s just say they’ll reveal themselves to be that soon enough. Even if we can’t like them, respect them or empathise, we can surely refrain from judging.

This becomes infinitely important when you find someone like this becoming a part of your inner circle. Like Jagjit Singh sang “milna julna jahaan zaroori ho, milne julne ka hausla rakhna”.

It’s important to have a home that you feel like coming back to: Or maybe I should say, it’s important to make your home a place that the rest of the family feels like coming home to. I took this for granted until I became part of a household that did not have this. Where people didn’t undergo the transformation of coming “in” from “out” at the threshold. Where home was just another destination in the day’s schedule. This way, the stress never leaves you, and your defences are the only things that stay up… After this experience, since the time we finally made our own home, my primary focus has been on ensuring that on coming in through the door, we both feel absolutely comfortable becoming ourselves J.

It’s good to carry some stuff home from work: Like your efficiencies, or the way you take feedback. I found that when I refrained from retaliating to a “why can’t you manage this well” with a “well, you’re not perfect yourself”, I actually focussed on the benefits of improving. And, on marking the improvement, I found that at home, we got better at having objective discussions about each other, which could otherwise turn into hurt-full shouting matches.

We all perform functions – at work, at home, as part of a family, or a relationship – but we feel far freer to be petulant and demanding of leeway in our personal roles. But who does this help?