This week, for whatever reason, I’ve been feeling nostalgic.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching The West Wing – with all it’s turn of the millennium politics and (lack of) gadgets.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been on Tumblr a bit too much and my dash seems to be obsessed with 90’s & early 2000’s music.
So I posted about it on twitter, and a friend who is quite a bit older than me made the comment that I don’t qualify for that yet.
In typical Sonja style, I launched back that haven gone through ” 3 abusive relationships, 2 hospitalisations and a failed engagement.” I was more than qualified to feel nostalgic – for the girl I was, and for the woman I might have become.
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When I started high school, I was pretty confident about what my life was going to look like. None of the truly horrible stuff had happened to me yet, and I was very firm in my convictions, in my faith, in what I wanted out of life. I knew I wanted to go to uni, but the end goal was always to get married and have kids. I know this sounds like an outdated goal, but both my parents worked so much when I was younger, that I knew I wanted to stay home and look after a household. When I was this little girl, I just assumed that God would find me a perfect man, who’d propose in the perfect way and we’d have a perfect wedding and live in a perfect house with our perfect children. I honestly thought that’s how marriage worked…or more likely, I hoped it would be.
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It’s been 10 years since I started high school. For me that seems like forever ago, for a lot of you it probably makes me look like a baby. Yet I’m exhausted. I have experienced what anyone would rightly judge as more than anyone should in a lifetime, and I’m a person with a mild mental illness history. This week alone, I’ve run into my abuser’s wife at my local shops which proves that they still live in my suburb, and I got the ring that was to be my wedding band back from being resized so that I can wear it on my right hand. Oh, and I failed all my subjects last semester because I was such an emotional wreck that I barely finished any assessments to an adequate standard.
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So, what’s the point?
The point dear reader is this: though I am only 23, I have a wealth of life experience.
The point is that all around me, I hear people dissing young people’s opinions, when I happen to know that we think deeply and act on our convictions.
The point is that ‘young adult fiction’ is some of the most emotional real and raw literature I’ve ever read.
The point is that I am nostalgic for a life I never experienced, and it’s a real to me as it would be to 99 year old lady in a nursing home who reminices about what might have been.
The point is, I have a voice – we all have voices – and it’s worth listening to.
Confessions of a Twenty-Something Chocoholic 