10 lessons we never learned in college

If you’re looking at your life as it is and thinking, This is not what I had planned, I want to affirm that there are a billion and one other wonderful ways that your life can still unfold.

A lot of my readers are many years out from our early twenties, when anything seemed possible just because we didn’t know how the world worked. We didn’t expect to become a cog in a machine just because we needed a job. We didn’t know that mental illness and disability would require us to move with more tenderness and care in the world. We didn’t know just how unprepared we would be for adulthood because we were raised by parents who didn’t know what they were doing. We didn’t know how draining it would be to do our taxes or cook a nutritious meal. We weren’t told that we would have to take time to heal and rest and simply be.

Here are some thoughts that might help with the comedown of your early twenties. You might find some of them painfully realistic, but let there be lightness and freedom in what is, as opposed to how you think things should be.

  1. A good life can be one where you feel blessed to have the life you have and also wish you were never born.

  2. Despite what social media tells you, it’s really hard to have it all. Pick priorities that align with what you actually value and don’t live for someone else.

  3. The challenges we face now are going to demand more discipline, courage, resilience, and capability. Learning to regulate your own nervous system will do a lot in helping you be part of the solution.

  4. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to keep doing what you’re doing, but in a way that better respects your own boundaries and is slightly more in line with your values.

  5. You don’t need the world to be perfect to feel good.

  6. The chaos of the universe does not care about you, and you are entitled to nothing. But you can still choose to make your home here anyways.

  7. You will not save the world because you cannot single-handedly fix any broken system. But systems are made of individuals, and each of us has the potential to be a leader in our own way. In the words of David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”

  8. You might not be what your parents wanted you to be, and that’s fine. You don’t need to be good at everything — or anything for that matter. Under capitalism, you just need to be good enough at something to be paid for it. But outside of capitalism, it’s more important that you’re a good neighbor and friend, to others and yourself.

  9. Greatness is also the slow and deliberate work of fixing and maintaining things.

  10. Sometimes a good day is one where you can read a book, do laundry, and call a friend you’ve been meaning to catch up with for a while.