Twenty-Bluffing

let’s talk about sex, baby

May 16th, 2025

This post contains blunt and explicit discussions of sex, sexual assault, and things of that nature. Please read at your own discretion.

(Also, if you’re going to be weird about me, a twenty-six-year-old adult woman, talking about sex publicly, maybe skip this one. And watch Sex and the City or something.)

I have a complicated relationship with sex.

As a high schooler, sex was just a concept to me; it lived in the jokes of fifteen-year-olds who had never even had their first kiss or allusions in Taylor Swift lyrics about a woman being “better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” It was something that was never brought up with my parents and rarely brought up with my sister, something devoted only to lunch table gossip and slumber party whispers. It was never tangible. And because of that, it became coveted.

I became very into sexual liberation, which in hindsight is quite funny considering I didn’t even properly make out with someone until I was seventeen. But who cared? I shared my fantasies with my friends, convinced that when the time came for me to finally have sex all of the knowledge (read: false expectations) I’d gained through fanfiction would turn me into a siren instead of an awkward teenager. Every single sentence became an innuendo; I posted photos on Instagram of thigh-high socks and fishnet tights, convinced that I was going to be the face of radical feminine sexuality.

And then during my first semester of college, I woke up in the middle of the night to my then-boyfriend’s fingers inside of me. Without my consent.

A year later, as I began to fully understand what had happened to me that day, I found myself in a new relationship that was also taking a dark turn. Reconciling with the fact that I had been assaulted didn’t leave me with much of a sex drive, and my then-boyfriend began resenting that fact. He became very controlling about every aspect of my life: insisting he spend every night in my dorm room even when I didn’t want him there, getting angry when I wanted to spend the night at my friend’s apartment, refusing to let me shower alone, asking to read my diary entries, and, most critically, emotionally manipulating me every time I said I didn’t want to have sex. Sex became something used to avoid a fight. It became my obligation as a girlfriend. I would say no, but that no didn’t matter; I would get iced out and ignored until I gave in. It came to a head when he coerced me to have sex with him in my own house with my entire family home. It was the only time I ever cried during it.

These two experiences would completely alter my perception of sex. To me, sex wasn’t something connected with love, but rather a completely separate act. It was fun! But it wasn’t something I needed. I’d hear my friends talk about their own experiences and live vicariously through them, but I couldn’t relate to this feeling of constantly wanting to have sex, of craving it. I’d read romance novels where the characters would actually get irritable if they went multiple days in a row without getting their rocks off and think “wow, I guess you do have to make some stuff up when telling a fictional story,” only to read online reviews and find out those scenes were highly relatable to people. It began to affect my romantic relationships; it wasn’t uncommon for a partner to tell me they were sexually frustrated, even ending relationships over it.

And I was frustrated with myself! Why couldn’t I just be normal? Why couldn’t I have a normal relationship with sex?? Was I somewhere on the asexual spectrum? Was my Prozac inhibiting my sex drive? Had my past trauma affected me so deeply that I was incapable of going back to that high school teenager who was so vocal about the liberating aspects of sex? All of these were plausible, and yet none of them felt like the correct answer. I felt somewhere in between–––with too high of a sex drive to be considered asexual, and way too low of a sex drive to be anything else. Going off of my Prozac wasn’t an option either–––it’s the only thing keeping me from being agoraphobic. I felt like there was something wrong with me, something broken, a piece that had once existed removed from me without my knowledge or permission. A piece that was vital to understanding human intimacy and sexuality was gone, but everyone around me still had it. An understanding that I, on some level, once had, but lost somehow.

When I began dating my current boyfriend, I very quickly told him that I wanted to take things slow; I wanted to be sure he liked me for me, not just because of a service I could provide for him. This set in motion a process that I was unaware was even happening. We would spend time just kissing, something I hadn’t done since I was seventeen. Slowly, I was being afforded the gentleness and care that I was denied in my first moments of intimacy. I often tell my boyfriend that the song So High School by Taylor Swift reminds me of him because he makes me feel like a teenager again, but it’s more than just the butterflies and schoolyard crush; I’m experiencing the slow burgeoning of a teenager coming into their sexuality, just in my mid-twenties. He has allowed me to develop my interests, always taking into account what I am comfortable with and never crossing any lines. I needed that fundamental exploration of interest that had been denied to me in college. I needed to take things slow and figure them out for myself instead of being rushed into doing something I was not emotionally ready for. There’s a lot of conversation online about “healing your inner child,” but he has definitely healed my inner eighteen-year-old.

I am now, please excuse my vulgarity, super horny for my boyfriend (okay, maybe not what you’d consider super. I still think I have a relatively low-ish sex drive. But! I understand all those romance novel scenes now! And for me, that’s super horny!).

I was initially very hesitant to write this blog post–––after all, I grew up with sex never really being talked about besides a “that’s what she said” joke thrown around–––but I also know that in that time where I was really struggling, the only solace I found was in other people who also didn’t have a super high sex drive. Even as I’ve begun developing my sexuality and even as my sex drive has slightly increased, I still don’t consider myself a particularly sexual being, and that’s okay. I’m thrilled for people who are actually super horny (the last thing I want is for this to get misconstrued as a puritanical “there’s too much sex in society” rant), but I’m finally becoming thrilled in my own experience with sex.

Coming into your sexuality in your mid-twenties is a weird experience. While my personal experience with sexual assault definitely changed and informed my perception of sex, I know there are people out there who aren’t completely comfortable with their sexuality for plenty of other reasons. But I really think that this is a side of the conversation that should be normalized. I think that it shouldn’t be considered weird to discover your sexuality in your late twenties, or even later! There is so much pressure in early adulthood to completely figure out who you are and never deviate from that for the rest of your life–––both in one’s sexual life, but in their personal and professional lives too–––but that’s simply not how human beings work. We are ever-changing. We are having new experiences every day, and to assume we will never change from them after the age of twenty-one is just absurd.

What I believed at fifteen–––that sex would liberate me and become a defining aspect of my life, what I believed at twenty-one–––that my opportunity to learn and explore who I was sexually had been taken from me, and what I believe now at twenty-six–––that there is no “timeline” in learning and developing, are all dramatically different opinions of sex, and yet they are all a part of who I am. I can’t wait to see what my opinion is on sex at 30, or 40, and to see how I evolve. I hope you’re able to see that same evolution in yourself too.
a postmortem on the election

November 7th, 2024

When I first started this blog, its intent was to be a place of joint commiseration for the very normal things that suck during your twenties–––becoming an independent adult, job hunting, dating, personal growth, etc. What I forgot is that there has been absolutely nothing about my twenties that has been normal, and nothing proved that more than the 2024 presidential election.

To say that I am disappointed by the results of Tuesday’s election would be underselling it. I barely slept–––I woke up early Wednesday morning to use the bathroom, saw the results come in, and could not go back to sleep–––and when I finally did get up for the day all I did was sit on the couch, doomscroll Twitter, and cry. But behind the tears is just emptiness; there is a helplessness, a hollowness that has grown inside of me over the past 36 hours and threatens to consume me. When Trump won in 2016, I was angry. I was seventeen and I had only really developed a political and social consciousness about two years prior, so I was full of optimistic zeal that surely the system would prevent him from doing the heinous promises he ran his campaign on. But eight years later, I am a beaten down version of that girl, someone who no longer has that optimism that carried her through the first term.

I think that this emptiness stems from all of the “despites” in regard to Trump. Despite being convicted on thirty-four criminal charges, despite being found liable for sexual abuse, despite all of Project 2025 (which, as so elegantly Tweeted by Matt Walsh, is in fact part of the plan), despite holding a rally at Madison Square Garden so hateful and racist that one of the speakers openly called it a Nazi rally and he was cheered on by the crowd, and, for everyone who voted for him because “he’ll be good for the economy,” despite the fact that his planned economic tariffs will send inflation skyrocketing. Despite all of that, and the many, many, many other horrible things that this man has said, done, or stood for, people still elected him.

Someone once asked me why I consider myself very left politically, and I explained that every single aspect of my world-view is fueled by compassion for other people; that with every choice I make, whether on a ballot or just day-to-day, I consider not just how it will affect me, but everyone I care about; that the most important thing to me is that every single human being has fundamental human rights. And for a very long time, I really, truly only wanted to see the good in people. But this emptiness that I feel reflects the realization that a majority of voters in America do not have other people’s best interests at heart.

Ethel Cain, a singer I am just now slowly becoming familiar with, made two different statements about the election results, one on her Tumblr account and one on her Instagram stories, both of which resonated with me deeply. I highly recommend reading her entire Tumblr post, but I want to speak specifically about the section where she says,

“Everybody is so incredibly hateful. We are a loveless, disrespectful nation. We are spread so thin by our government that we would sell each other out in a heartbeat for an ounce of relief. This is what we’ve come to. It’s not even about Trump at this point… This is indicative of [a] deeper problem. This is just the ugly consequence of the already present reality in this country that we all just despise each other. There is no solidarity and there is no love.”

This is the hollow feeling in my chest, this reckoning that there are people out there who hate the mere existence of people who are just trying to survive. The hatred of transgender people, the hatred of gay people, the hatred of immigrants, of women, of people of color, of disabled people, of poor people, of anyone who does not fit into the “ideal” mold is so ingrained into the people of this country that the majority elected a shining beacon of hatred into the presidency a second time. In just two Tweets, I have seen vitriol thrown at women and their autonomy so vile that I almost threw up. There is no love. There is no solidarity.

Ethel Cain’s second statement outlines how we can potentially get out of this. On her Instagram stories, she said “‘I don’t owe anyone anything’ is not a mindset you can have anymore. American individualism will be the death of us if we don’t get it together… You have to be a human. You cannot give into apathy.” The idea that someone is inherently more deserving of existence than another person due to factors outside of their control is what fuels this hatred, and this idea occurs only when one refuses to surround themselves with people different from them. This is my call-to-action, my ultimate reason for writing this piece. I am begging, imploring you to give a fuck about people who live a different life than you.

I’m going to be completely honest, I feel really helpless right now. I am terrified of what a second Donald Trump presidency means for me as a woman, as a queer person, and as a person with both a learning disability and chronic illness. I am terrified of what a second Trump presidency means for my trans friends and my non-white friends. People keep saying “well, we survived four years of this before,” but so many people didn’t. I don’t know what else I can offer besides this feeling, but at its core this blog is to help people not feel alone in whatever they’re going through. I hope, for right now, it offers even an iota of community for you.
older but not necessarily wiser

April 20th, 2024

This week, on Thursday, April 18th, I turned twenty-five-years-old. I am quite literally at the quintessential “twenty-something” age –– smack in the middle of my twenties and still figuring things out.

Twenty-five is an age that has been looming ominously over my head since I entered my twenties, inspiring so many complicated feelings it’s almost impossible to surmise them all. But, as a writer (read as: professional yapper), what else can I do but try?

At twenty, I started writing what I had believed to be my first novel. Inspired by the death of my grandfather, as well as the beautiful Greek traditions that I’ve been raised with, the novel was a love letter to my family, to my culture, and to my grandfather himself. The first fifty pages of the novel served as my creative thesis for my creative writing BFA, and I went on to write over 30,000 words of it (which is no small feat!). While planning out my thesis, I boldly stamped my foot on the ground and declared that I would have this book finished and published through traditional publishing by the time I turned twenty-five.

I have not touched the novel in three years.

There is a lot of discourse about former gifted kids and the pressures put on us that follow us into adulthood, but there is no pressure quite as unique, horrifying, and crushing as the pressure a former gifted kid places on themself. My delusions of grandeur infiltrated my brain so deeply that every time I pushed off writing more of the novel for any reason –– be it writing myself into a corner with the plot, general writer’s block, or what ended up being late-diagnosed ADHD — I would berate myself so viciously that I wound up no longer wanting to write. I went over a full year not writing anything creatively besides a yearly April poetry challenge (and even doing that in 2023 was like pulling teeth). I set an expectation for myself, and when it became clear that I was not going to meet it, I forgot how to do my passion for fun. And I plan on finishing the novel eventually –– I believe the story is strong and it’s a story that I know I need to tell –– but I have spent the past three months re-teaching myself how to write for fun, for me, and without these incessant pressures that I place on myself.

Yet while I unlearn these behaviors, turning twenty-five initially filled me with dread, with the damning knowledge that I had let my twenty-year-old self down, and the sensation that I am slowly wasting my youth and heading further to an expiration date. Our society places so much value in child prodigies, young geniuses, and the idea that a woman is at her most valuable when she is barely-legal (hello Leonardo DiCaprio) that my initial gut reaction to aging is “oh God, I’m running out of time to be relevant. I’m wasted, washed up, and no longer young,” which is an objectively insane thing to think at only twenty-five. But if I know it’s irrational, why can’t I shake the feeling?

There is a flip-side to all of this, the other side of the coin of the dread of aging. Turning twenty-one during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic definitely stole a few years from me in a sense, but at twenty-five I feel as though I am reclaiming that early-twenties youth somehow. At the beginning of my twenties, I focused so intently on my studies and career, and I was in a relationship that I was convinced was going to end in marriage; in a way, I was determined to grow up too fast without even realizing I was doing so. I was so prepared for the rest of my life that I was forgetting to live in the current moments of my life.

But between struggling in the job market and getting dumped, I’ve found myself this past month in a state of –– for lack of a more eloquent term –– just vibing. Everything has been pulled out from underneath me and it’s forced me to truly live day-to-day instead of with a ten-year plan. I get to experience the magic of hanging out with my friends, both in bars and at home, and being hot and drunk and carefree and listening to way too much Chappell Roan and just being young. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing at any given time, and that is equal parts anxiety-inducing and liberating.

I spent the evening of my twenty-fifth birthday at a book-themed bar, checking out other hot people and slinging back Alan Ginsberg-themed cocktails like they were water and simply enjoying being in the moment with some of my closest friends gossiping about my celebrity crush (NHL superstar Matt Rempe hmu) and it was simply fun. I think I’ve spent the last five years so organized, planned out, and rigid that I forgot how to take it easy and enjoy myself. That’s not to say I’m thriving in unemployment –– I would confidently cut off my left pinky toe if it meant getting an entry-level job in publishing –– but it feels as though I’ve finally let go of some of the residual anxiety, that feeling that at twenty-five I’m past my prime, and am finally living for the first time ever.

I think I will always have a complicated relationship with aging; I’m definitely someone who has a “Peter Pan Syndrome” and idealizes childhood in a way that may not be the most healthy. But in tandem with that, I think that having my life so up-in-the-air right now might actually be the best thing for me. If anything, it’s taught me to slow down, to not set such lofty expectations for myself, to just be along for the ride. Because it is in these moments that I not only get the best inspiration for my writing, but also when I feel the happiest and most alive.

Though, I’m still not sure about dating apps. That may be the one thing I never get too used to. We’ll see.
all too well (twentybluffing’s version)

March 19th, 2024

In all of the time that I spent planning out this blog — what topics I was going to write about, what I wanted to say — I never thought I was going to write about today’s topic: heartbreak and dating in your 20s.

Up until a few weeks ago, I was in what I considered to be my final, eternal relationship; we were together for two years and often talked about marriage down the line. He was someone who could practically read my mind, our souls so entwined it was difficult to decipher where he ended and I began. The search was over! I had found my soulmate. The suffering through uncomfortable Tinder conversations and awkward first dates during my college years was over; I had found the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.

Then he broke up with me.

I have been dumped many, many times before. I’ve even been the one to do the dumping from time to time! But each of those previous relationships were only a few months long and none of them could’ve prepared me for heartbreak like this. When a guy dumps you after three months of dating, it sucks, but you pour a drink, hang out with your best friends, and pull yourself together relatively quickly. When a guy dumps you after two years of dating, it stops your world in its tracks. He was my best friend, the first person I’d call when I had something to share and now we do not speak.

And my friends have been awesome, I truly have the greatest support system someone could ever wish for, but there is still a gap where his presence used to be. After two years with someone, they become ingrained in everything you do. They’re part of your routines and schedules, someone whose orbit is intersected with your own, making it impossible to not notice their absence. While I have moved past the initial shock and mourning of the breakup, it is still fresh enough that I am reminded of him in the most seemingly innocuous of times – seeing his favorite beer in the grocery store, entering a shop and thinking “oh he’d like this,” or discovering a new show and immediately wanting to share it with him. This is not the same heartbreak that I experienced at eighteen; this is something living, disorienting, and guttural.

What does one do when the future they had planned for themselves gets pulled out from under them? Obviously part of this is because I am nowhere near ready yet, but the idea of dating again, of starting from scratch, terrifies me. I dated quite a bit between the ages of eighteen and twenty, but the world shut down just before my twenty-first birthday and I did not date again until I met my now-ex just before my twenty-third birthday. I turn twenty-five next month, and I’ve spent the entire first half of my twenties pretty consistently not dating. Where does one meet other people when they’re not in school or working? (Side note: the job hunt is still going strong.) Are dating apps the only option, and if so, how does one use them effectively? Beyond the how of it all, that the twenties are a spectrum, people who are the same age may be in vastly different stages of life — this is quite literally the entire conceit of this blog – so how can two people line up in this way?

I’m aware that I don’t need to find the answers to these questions right this second. I’m still very much in the process of the breakup and I do not plan on dating again for quite some time, but these questions still linger, a sword of Damocles over my head that must be addressed someday. My ex and I had discussed all of the hard and important topics — triggers and trauma, marriage, religion, children, sexual exploration, ideal living locations, and more that I surely will remember after I hit publish on this post — and the idea of needing to build that foundation again someday with someone else is not only scary, it’s exhausting. The idea of opening myself up to potentially experience this heartbreak again is exhausting.

This blog started with the hope to give a voice to the thoughts and experiences of hundreds of other twenty-somethings living through this day and age, where I could say the quiet part out loud and someone could read it and think “wow this is so true bestie.” And while that will always be the case for the things I post here, I think this time I need a little bit more.

I need advice this time.

I need guidance. There are tons of other twenty-somethings who have had their heart broken at this stage of life and have needed to pick themselves back up and try again and again and again. As someone going through this for the first time in my twenties, how do you get the courage to do so? It feels so different from heartbreak in my teens, but is it fundamentally the same? Please share advice, tidbits, insight, anything that can be offered.

In the meantime, I will be doing newly-single hot girl shit: finishing an entire bottle of wine while sobbing to the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
on the blank slate that is january 1st

January 1st, 2024

Making New Year’s resolutions is always a slippery slope. It’s practically a cliche at this point to renege on one’s resolutions only a few weeks into the year, so what’s the point in making them at all? I have found this especially true since graduating from college; what is the point of making resolutions if I feel so utterly out of control of the direction of my life? Realistically, the best resolution would be to get a job, but as I discussed in my previous post, that is apparently not entirely up to me.

And yet the temptation of the New Year resolution is far too great. There is something so alluring about the fresh start the New Year brings, and I find myself longing to indulge in the tradition. So now I am at a crossroads: do I sink into the despairing feeling that I have no control over my life, that no matter what goals I set for myself I am doomed to be a victim of random events, or do I choose to be a bit more optimistic and focus on bettering the things that I do have control over?

I suppose I’ve always been an optimist.

And while this blog will always first and foremost be a place for people in their twenties to be lost together, it is also a place to hopefully find solutions to that. Plus, if I publicize my resolutions, it encourages me to hold myself accountable more.

Without further ado, I present my resolutions going into 2024:

Perhaps the thing I need to hold myself to the most is to finish the first draft of my novel. I’ve been working on this poor thing for almost five years now, or so I say. I indeed started conceptualizing the novel in 2019, but after working on it for about three years, I have spent the past two guiltily avoiding it. That feeling of avoidance, frankly, sucks. It makes me feel like a failure, like I am wasting my creative writing degree by letting it sit on the shelf. While logically I understand that writer’s block does not make me a failure, these emotions persist and persist until I begin to dread telling people that I am a writer, knowing I’ll inevitably get the “what are you working on” question that I hate answering. This cannot be a healthy way of going about my writing, and this guilt may wind up killing my love of the task. If that were to happen, I’m not sure what I would do with myself. And so, it’s time to light a fire under my ass and begin working on it again.

The next two resolutions both branch off from the first one. First, I want to write more in general. Beyond my novel (my white whale), I love writing in all mediums. I love writing poetry, I love writing short stories, I love writing these blog posts! And while starting this blog was one avenue for me to write more, the long expanse of time between my last post and this one shows that I still struggle a bit with that. I have ADHD, which makes focusing on my writing difficult for me, but I need to stop using that as an excuse. I’ve been gifted a FreeWrite for Christmas (not sponsored, I just love this thing), which is a smart typewriter that is made to eliminate distractions while writing, and I intend to make the most of this gift. If I can make any small adjustment to make sure I am writing without distraction, that I am fulfilling the desires I have without letting myself space out and give up, then I will be happy.

The other resolution that branches off from the first is to feel less guilty about things. I am my own worst critic, and I think that’s something that a lot of people my age can relate to. I constantly expect the absolute best from myself, leading to guilt when I am not meeting my standards. At first, this may not sound terrible, but the standards I set for myself are not always feasible. I am incapable of relaxing; I have convinced myself that if I am not working at every moment of the day, then I must be lazy and wasting my time and I begin to feel so immeasurably guilty that I just freeze. This guilt is counterintuitive. It prevents me from creating in the way that I want to because I become paralyzed. I need to cut myself some slack; while I should still be disciplined in my work and get the things done I need to do, there is no point in wallowing in guilt if I don’t do it all in one day. Allowing myself grace in moments where I falter will actually lead to more productivity since I won’t be afraid of disappointing myself.

My final resolution is a culmination of all of these. When I’ve written more (as a result of both the resolution to write more and the resolution to feel less guilt), I want to submit my writing to online magazines. I am the co-editor-in-chief of The Icarus Writing Collective, an online literary magazine, and through Icarus, I get to read some of the most gorgeous, heart-wrenching, spine-tingling writing submitted by people who could be considered my peers, and I get to be a vessel for these talented writers to be published. I am endlessly inspired by the Icarus contributors, and yet I have not submitted my own writing anywhere in years. I discussed my relationship with rejection a little bit in my previous post, and that same fear and disappointment and world-ending feeling go beyond job applications and into my personal writing. That drowning feeling encompasses my senses and I find myself worried that a rejection of my writing means that I am actually terrible and my dreams have been a waste. Writing this out, it’s easy to see how silly that sounds; just because one person or one publication does not like my writing does not mean that I should just give up on it completely, but anxiety and insecurity are not rational. In 2024, I want to do my best to push through this anxiety and submit my writing to various publications. After all, your twenties are the time to try new things and find out what works for you, this is just my way of doing so.

There are so many things in my life that I feel like I have no control over, but these resolutions are a bit more manageable. I have no idea if I will be able to keep these resolutions throughout the New Year, but I do know I won’t be sure until I try. I am at a point in my life where everything seems so up in the air, where anything can happen. I might as well do my best with the aspects of my life that are fully within my control.

After all, the temptation for “new year, new me” is far too great to pass up, no matter how cringe.
abandon all hope, ye who are in search of a job

November 10th, 2023

Three and a half years ago, I sat in my Boston apartment in the days leading up to the second semester of my junior year of college and began to read Dante’s Inferno. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve long been a fan of the classics, and Inferno had always been on my radar, so what better way to spend my last few days of calm?

Three and a half years later, I realize now that Dante forgot a very crucial circle of Hell while writing: job applications.

I’m not sure if it’s a symptom of online applications, living in a post-COVID economy, or an oversaturation of applicants, but applying for jobs after college has become a Sisyphean task, a constant cycle from which I have no reprieve. I have both a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree, things which were proverbially beaten into High School Liz’s head as practical guarantees to succeeding in life, yet I have written over fifty cover letters for jobs that have either rejected or ghosted me. And while I have the reprieve of my friends and TikTok showing me that other people my age are in the same boat, the temptation to fall into the river of self-deprecation is all too great.

The crumbling job market is by no means a new phenomenon, nor am I the first person to write about its effects. But there are real emotional consequences to this, regardless of if it’s “normal.” Just as I said in my intro post to this blog: people talk a lot about the normalcy of something (not knowing what one’s doing, the struggle to get a job, etc.) but they don’t talk about how much that sucks. I know that I am not the only person who is struggling to get hired right now despite being qualified, but that knowledge doesn’t stop that wounded feeling from chipping away at my pride whenever a rejection email comes through. It is as though these emails give credence to my innermost insecurities, no matter how much I try to ignore them. What if, actually, I am not qualified for these jobs? What if I’ve made a huge mistake by entering this field? Is this the rest of my life? Thoughts I would normally never entertain suddenly seep their way into the forefront of my mind, and my LinkedIn feed showing all of my peers’ successes becomes my worst enemy. Knowing I am not alone does not lessen the blow to my ego.

It’s as though I have been left out in the middle of the ocean, desperately trying to tread water while watching everyone I’ve ever known be rescued by the Coast Guard. I’m still here, begging for a moment of rest that never comes. And I know, I know, I should not be comparing myself to other people, but when has anyone ever taken that advice? Despite knowing otherwise, it’s so normal to compare our successes (and our failures) to others, and I don’t think we should deny that we do so to save our pride. Jealousy is a human emotion just as valid and common as happiness, anger, and frustration, and pretending we don’t feel it in order to make ourselves look better seems counterintuitive.

I don’t write this to complain about my horrible luck in the job industry –– at least, that’s not the only reason I write this (I’m allowed to be a little bit self-indulgent, it is my blog after all). Rather, I write this for the same reason I started this blog in general: to give voice to those who are perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed for being in the same position. It is disheartening to apply for a job these days, and that sucks. It is rough out here, especially for those who graduated from college in the midst of the pandemic. I don’t necessarily have the solution for this (I am not a job recruiter, I don’t work in that industry, and I have no experience in it) but I still think it’s important to talk about. Our society focuses so much on hustle culture––the idea that if we are not consistently working, producing, and capitalizing on what we are good at, then we must be failing––that we forget to acknowledge and nurture the very real and valid frustrations that arise in these situations. It is okay to feel dejected about the state of the job market right now; it makes perfect sense. But we get up, we continue, and we try again, despite the nagging voice in our brain telling us not to.

And hey, Dante eventually got out of Hell, right? Maybe we will too.
an intro to twenty-bluffing

November 2nd, 2023

There is something inherently isolating about being in your twenties. Moreso than perhaps any other decade of one’s life, the twenties have a massive range of life stages. You have your fresh twenty-year-olds, potentially the most consistent group, more often than not still in college, knowing their path leads straight to graduation. But from twenty-two to twenty-nine, the world is vast, confusing, and unpredictable. Writing this, I am twenty-four years old. I know people my age who are getting engaged, married, or pregnant; people who are on their third promotion at work; people who seemingly know exactly what they’re doing in life. But on the other hand, there are twenty-four-year-olds like me: struggling to find a job and feeling a bit like a wanderer out in the desert, confused and thirsting for something greater.

Everyone always says it’s normal to be uncertain of things when you’re in your twenties. It’s said constantly, by celebrities, by therapists, by self-help gurus, by pretty much everyone. The phrase is so widespread that it’s almost become a cliché. And yet, no one discusses how much that sucks. It’s great to know that what’s happening is normal, but it would be even better if I had some commiseration as well. If there are other people completely lost, then why are we not finding solace in each other?

That sense of community, people who understand just how fucking confusing this decade is, is what I want Twenty-Bluffing to be. I want to speak with candor about this sense of loss, about the frustrations of feeling not enough, about this intersection of childhood and adulthood that feels as though I’ve been thrown into the ocean with weights on my ankles. I want to discuss job applications and nostalgia and sex and ambition and burnout. In doing so, I hope that anyone who reads this and is in the same boat finds solace in the knowledge that they are not alone. Even when it’s embarrassing to admit it, none of us know what the fuck we’re doing.

I hope you stick with me on this. Let’s commiserate on being lost together.