i thought life looked like this up until i was 18 years old...

A piece I did spontaneously back in 2021 when I was reflecting on how differently I viewed life and the journey of life as an 18 year old versus as a 26 year old. It took me those years after college to realize the path we were taught as children and teens were just narratives. They are clean like in the illustrations. Simple lines, clean boxes, clean colors. It's all that our teen brains were able to comprehend, after all. But these were narratives we did not need to follow. The process to unlearning those narrative-formed life paths took me many years. I had to first actually LIVE life on my own, as an adult, for a couple of years before I understood how the constructs of what life "should" be were just constructs. The process of unlearning that then coming to terms with the messiness and the true non-linearity of life also took a few more years. As I am now in my late twenties, turning 30 soon, I think my late twenties was spent leaning deeply into the messiness of life and learning to navigate it. Accepting the ups and downs as they come, acknowledging the mess and noticing the beauty of it all.