The joy of being twenty

 

 Our twenties,
 So damn fast and relentlessly slow,
 I wish they would never pass; 
 I would like to hold them tight and never abandon them,
 I imagine our complicit looks, our follies,
 Our secrets and our innocence.
 God bless our loves so right and so wrong,
 Our beats per minute, 
 our disappointments and our addictions.
 To our tenacity and our tears, 
 your smiles,
 That made me the person I am. 
 Maybe one day we will have the courage,
 In the meantime, 
 let's enjoy this cowardice 
 and float in this sea of ​​uncertainty.
 To my mistakes, 
 your shortcomings, 
 our lives, 
 so intense and so fleeting. 

I still perfectly remember the feeling of turning 20 years old. For me it really represented a big change, not only because I was by myself in Vietnam during my gap year before university, but because I knew that something of me, a small part of my carefreeness will leave me to create some space for the adult part that was going to arrive . I’ve celebrated it in Da Nang, in a beach bar, where the owner apparently was obsessed with Bob Marley and the Jamaican culture. There were flags and posters of him everywhere. So here I am, sitting with completely strangers around a fire in a beach, listening to Bob Marley and express my birthday wish to the stars: “please universe, let me keep this emotions and this outstanding curiosity about everything that surrounds me until I will close my eyes and I will leave this spectacular view”.  

It’s been a hard and sad year for most of us, we had to change our lives in one way or another but, finally it looks like we are going back to our normal lives. The smell of spring has brought us joy and a desire to restart and to finally spend some time with people we have missed the most.

We certainly experienced a historical period, for the first time in history almost, we were not allowed to see each other, to hug, to kiss, to feel loved. Technology definitely helped us to keep human connections, and especially to continue to work and try to keep our lives as normal as they were. But despite that, despite the possibility to call someone, despite smart working and online university classes, we, young adults, have miss one of the most important years of our lives. Where we should had created new relationships, travelled, experienced new emotions, cried for a sad love story, discovered what we like, Have fun!

Through the inhibitions of social interactions, we found ourselves craving for connection in every single aspect. Last week I have read a fun article on Vice, where a guy after living alone in Paris for three years in a nice apartment, after a few months of watching his social life die in front of his eyes, he decided to move into a 400-square-metre mansion with 21 strangers just to have human interactions again.

This is just an example that describes how it is almost impossible to forbid human interactions, because after all we are social animals with the need of confronting us and share and learn from each other new experiences of life. 

By putting judgements on the side, in a period of time where discovery is inhibited how are we carving our place in the world? It’s been over a year, and as a part of the younger generation, I feel the duty to voice these feelings and give a platform to what it means living our twenties inside a “box”.  Meet Rossella, Alberto and Chiara (Invented name), and read their stories about how they have experienced the last year and hopefully, it could help other young adults to feel less lonely.

Rossella, 23 years old.

“This fluidity is what fascinates me most about this age, the lack of boundaries to space, if not the limits that we set ourselves”.

Meet Rossella, a 23 years old girl, born and raised in Turin. “I think I have always had the need to express my poetic and creative soul, through the body, practicing rhythmic gymnastics at a competitive level, then with sound, having fun being a DJ in the disco, and now with thoughts and ideas thanks to my current job”.

After high school she decided to pursue a three-year degree course in interior design at the IAAD in Turin.  Among the various opportunities that the university has offered her, she told me the one most dear to her will remain the career day, a day dedicated to many professionals in the sector to select the most suitable graduate students for the job they are looking for.  On this occasion she met her current employer, Francesco Meneghello. “I immediately understood that it was the design studio I was looking for: a small company in the heart of Milan with a young owner in line with my philosophy of thought and taste”. So, the day after her graduation celebration, in full hangover, as she said, she went from being a student to be a professional with some fabulous sunglasses to cover the excesses of the previous evening.

Despite this year challenging for young artists she considers herself very lucky, “Working almost exclusively in the luxury sector, the pandemic has not had major repercussions on the projects, except for a first slight slowdown on the timing of construction sites. On the contrary, having all of us been forced to remain stuck at home, many people have understood the real importance and influence that the space that surrounds us has in everyday life on physical and mental well-being, making my professional figure as essential as it is now”.

The word she used to summarize all the emotions experienced this year with was uncertainty.

This period of isolation certainly took away some experiences and it brought a type of emptiness, quite hard to forget.  In Italy all the cultural structures, as museums, exhibitions were closed for almost a year, considered as the least important.

“I believe it has led to a general ugliness, because after all without art, in a broad sense, what are we? What are we left with?”

“Practicing a work of a creative nature myself, I can say that I have personally accused this cut, feeling many times without motivation and desire to do, almost as if the fuel for ideas was lacking”.

The decade that begins from the age of 20 to 30, it is a delicate moment of transition from our more adolescent and carefree figure to a definition of the more adult and mature version of ourselves. Being twenty means for her “experimentation”, this is what dictates the law to understand what belongs or not to our being and is what allows us to understand what type of path we want to follow.  In order to do all this, she said it is necessary to collect as many experiences as possible, different from each other. “This fluidity is what fascinates me most about this age, the lack of boundaries to space, if not the limits that we set ourselves”.

During this period, she told me she had some dark moments, for causes that go beyond the pandemic that we have all experienced, losing a figure very dear to her. “When this type of event runs into our life, the only thing you would need is to see the people closest to you to get out of the bubble of negative thoughts that crowd our heads. Forced isolation meant that I agonized much longer in deep pain with no escape, making the recovery process much longer and more complicated than any other period of normal life”.

A big part of our twenties is about social life, but what happens when social interactions are discouraged and forbidden? This was the main question I’ve been asking to myself this year.

“I personally and more generally think I can speak for almost all my peers, now we are looking for every type of experiences, even if this implies muting the various rules in place, such as the curfew rather than the denial of displacements. We could almost define it as a ‘rebellion with gloves’ since we are not talking about extreme or unconscious gestures, as can be a rave with 300 people in the middle of the woods, but a search for small moments of sharing”.

Never as in this age she does think the search for a comparison is fundamental, knowing that there are our peers who feel the same emotions and concerns gives us strength because we understand that we are less alone in the midst of all this chaos.

Despite the rules requested from the Italian government, after the first lockdown happened, where most of the young adults came back to their family homes, a lot of us went back to live alone and started organizing parties and find a way to connect with each other’s.  “We definitely attended several house parties, since it was the only chance to meet new people or simply to avoid ending everything at 10pm. Many times, I have found myself almost exhausted and exasperated by this side of my life, almost as if everything was justified since the only thing left to feel at least alive and part of something was to have fun, in any possible way”.

Since something is strongly repressed for a long period of time, as in this case it can be social interactions, night life and even sexual freedom, since in Italy, outside relatives and people involved in a serious relationship, it was not allowed to see each other, all this to a some point inevitably explodes, in even more extreme meanings than the ordinary she said.

We all dream of the moment when we could go back on a journey without worrying about being able to infect someone or be ourselves in danger, rather than returning to being masters of our lives by being able to choose between infinite possibilities for our future.

“What I wish for my future self it is to keep this easy going way of thinking as much as possible, to always have the courage and the desire to discover new points of view, avoiding as long as possible to re-enter under a label, but to be on the contrary, a muted form capable of reinventing itself in a thousand different ways”.

Alberto, 23 years old.

“I believe most of us wanted the chance to be free”.

I’ve met Alberto almost 10 years ago, we had a lot of friends in common and we started to hang out all together since high school. He was born and raised in Turin and he studied contemporary media culture in London.

After three years he came back to Italy to see where life would bring him. “I was lucky enough to work most of the pandemic. I started working as a production assistant in two projects, the first was a movie and the second one a TV series. Both the projects were very challenging since it was the first time working in the cinema industry, but they allowed me to not stay home so that was amazing”.

One of his main passion, besides movies, it’s photography, he told me he didn’t develop any particular new passions this year,  on the other hand he felt like he kind of lost inspiration in photography which mainly came from going out, meeting people and encountering every day moments trying to capture them but with work and the pandemic that feeling of life around him that used to inspire him faded.

He defined this year as the weirdest of his life, he has achieved a lot but at the same time he felt like many personal relationships have changed or as he say, “developed” and this led him to the conclusion on how important social life and events can be to shape someone’s personality.

“I believe the best thing about being 20 is that idea that you can still be a child and act foolish but at the same time you feel this need, or better to say push, to grow more mature and finding the balance between these two feelings makes everything funnier and more memorable”. 

Most of the young generation have felt a sense of rebellion against all the rules that have been requested. “Being home all the time really influences you in a bad way, especially when you are so full of life. I couldn’t wait to go out and occasionally break some rules to spend more time with my friends. I believe that should have been mandatory for mental health and denying seeing my friends in safe scenarios just sounded ridiculous to me”.  

His best memory of this period was last summer, when people started acting normal again and it was amazing, he said. “I had a lot of fun and managed to vent all that frustration and need to party in a context where everybody wanted to do so”. Despite the rules, with a smile, while he was touching his hair, he told me he actually attends a decent number of social events for the situation being.

 “I believe most of us wanted the chance to be free, maybe they didn’t really care for many of the things that weren’t allowed but once something is taken from you that’s when you start realizing you had in the first place”.

Most of us have felt the desire to have social interaction and he realized what it really means and how important it is for mental health. He believes this pandemic will change the way young people will construct their future social life in a better way.

“What I would like to keep of being 20 years old it’s the feeling that everything will end where it has to on its own, and the idea that despite people we love have different interests ,won’t grow apart from us in life”.

Chiara (invented name), 24 years old.

“20 years are not many, but they have been enough for me to learn that life really is just a series of phases of ups and downs”.

Chiara (invented name), preferred to stay anonymous.

She is 24 years old, born from an English mother and Sicilian father. “I say Sicilian and not Italian because I’ve realised the two are worlds apart”. She was raised in Paris, then lived in Rome for one year as a teenager when her family moved there and immediately left to go to boarding school in the UK. She moved to Rome four years ago after dropping out 2 years into University in the UK. She came to Rome because that’s where her parents were living and she needed their support, as well as Italy being her second country. One of her main passions is writing and she started writing for some journals in Rome.

She described this year of pandemic totally destructive. She has always been to International schools where pupils come and go every 2-4 years and so she has always had friends spread out across the globe. Friends that she often goes and visit and who often come and visit her. Each little group of friends have its own nucleus – all different but all family.

“This year I’ve been stuck in the same nucleus, fallen in love with one of the members of this particular and peculiar family and been intoxicated by the desire to always find a way to break the rules and live a Covid-free life”.

“You know, they say what you don’t know can’t hurt you… but spending every minute of every day with the people surrounding me has made me see and feel everything… hurting me to the core.”

There is no escape, she said, not from them no from oneself. She did not mean to say she does not love them, her love for them has grown even stronger. “I know them better than anyone else, and they do the same with me… but we are all going through our own individual crisis, and when each individual crumble, the group comes tumbling down after it”.  It hurts, she said, but she is certain they will come out of this stronger than ever, she is just not convinced they will do so together.

“20 years are not many, but they have been enough for me to learn that life really is just a series of phases of ‘ups and downs’ to put it bluntly. Each phase lasts a different amount of time than the previous one and the next one. When it’s down, t’s down, but I am consoled because the fact that I know that things will get better… for everyone”.