I’m Twenty-Three, I’m Running Out of Time

I wrote this last year, when I was 23. I'm turning 25 in 5 months. Time is ruthless.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single twenty-something-year-old girl I know can relate to sobbing hysterically to Vienna by Billy Joel. Not because the music is overwhelmingly beautiful, which it is, but because all of us can relate to the lyrics. It’s as if Joel sings directly to me when he says, “You can’t be everything you wanna be before your time”. Why do I, a twenty-three-year-old young woman, always feel like I’m running out of time? And why can so many others relate to this feeling?

When my twenty-something girlfriends and I go out for dinner and drinks, our conversations inevitably come to the same point with every sip of our spicy margaritas: our fear of not doing everything we want to do in this lifetime. My best friend is turning twenty-five this August, and she is already panicking about turning thirty soon and then basically coming to the dusk of her life within a minute or two, as if life is a sloppy drunken one-night stand with a random guy.

I used to plan my life and daydream about my 20s when I was a little kid. In my mind, I would be engaged or married at twenty-five, become a millionaire and a mom by thirty, and maybe own a yacht or two by thirty-five. I’m turning twenty-five next year, so it’s very unlikely I will be engaged, let alone married, by then. But then again I also thought I was going to marry my first love and he turned out to be a complete douchebag so not everything I think or plan should be taken seriously. However, my brain constantly compares my reality to my expectations. It’s Rachel’s 30th birthday episode of Friends, but make it The Groundhog Day. Every day I think to myself that if I want a child by thirty-five, I should start dating their father yesterday, exactly like Rachel. Then I spiral and start panicking about my career- if I get pregnant so soon, how am I going to build a million-dollar business?

The author of The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions, Nell Frizzel, describes the phase I am ligthly experiencing as the 'panic years': a period characterized by the upheaval of time, hormones, societal pressure, and the desire for motherhood that often hits women in their late twenties and early thirties like a speeding train.

The more I think about it, the more I see that for us women, it is a matter of our “biological clock” ticking regardless of whether we want children or not. In this patriarchal world, our worth is often tied to how fertile we are, so it is impossible to discuss the feeling of running out of time without mentioning it. However, I think in recent years, men have also started relating to the feeling more because of the pandemic. One day, I was nineteen, fresh out of a breakup with my supposed future husband, and the next I was turning twenty-two, fresh out of a breakup with the same guy ( don’t worry, I finally learned my lesson).

The pressure to hit certain milestones by a specific age is something almost every twenty-something grapples with, especially women. This anxiety, often tied to our so-called "biological clock" and societal expectations, can make us feel like we're constantly racing against time when the only thing racing should be our hearts because we're dancing too hard at the club. It’s not only exhausting but also pointless. After all, you really can’t be everything you wanna be before your time.