The Unedited Truth About Life And Love By 21

Life is still unfair but it’s real.

By

Woman in bikini on a tropical beach at Exuma
Jakob Owens / Unsplash

At the age of five, life is simple

We cry at the most simple things like not getting to buy your favorite candy

We had no clue about love

All we really cared about was playing with our toys and getting to watch our favorite shows on TV

This is as simple as life gets

At the age of ten, life becomes a little more complex than we thought

You have friends who talk about you behind your back

You become judged in school for just being yourself

Your definition of love is puppy love

Love is carefree and you feel butterflies all over

Life is sleepovers with your best friend during weekends or holidays and staying up until 4am

At the age of fifteen, life gets more overwhelming

You found the pain of losing friends a little bit too familiar

But you found someone you knew you’d call your best friend for a very long time

You got your heart broken by what you thought was love

Love for you was getting your heart racing every time you saw them in the hallway

You were just in love with the idea of love, but you didn’t know it at that time so you called it love

School overwhelms you with pressure as you’re going to be in College soon and you have to decide your future

At the age of seventeen, life gets real and confusing

You’re off to your first day in College and you don’t know absolutely how to fit in

You absolutely love the idea of a fresh start and yet the idea terrifies you to your very soul

You found new friends but you seem to not belong

Love gets confusing as you don’t know if you deserve to be loved

You have discovered the familiar feeling of anxiety and nights fill you up with feelings of loneliness and overthinking

At the age of nineteen, life slaps you in the face with facts about life

You only ever needed one small group of friends to call your best friends for life

You have come to realize that no family is ever perfect and sometimes your parents’ marriage doesn’t work out either

You open your eyes to the reality that sometimes love never works out the way you want them to

And you can’t ever force people to love you

And that you are not a reflection of the past, no matter what you have done

And lastly, the only love you ever needed was yourself and that is more than enough

You learn that love isn’t found but rather love finds you

At the age of twenty-one, life becomes extraordinarily beautiful even through all the bad days

You learn that you have to experience sadness and all those ugly emotions to get to the good part

You learn that you are deserving of love the moment you give love to yourself

Life becomes moments of indecisiveness about what the future holds but that is the beauty of life

Love becomes real and full of consistency, trust, and compromise

Love isn’t just an idea but love becomes something you choose and you choose them because you see all of your future in them

Life is still unfair but it’s real

You learn that you don’t always have to be okay and that it’s okay

You learn the beautiful masterpiece to let yourself feel human Thought Catalog Logo Mark