22 Things I Learned Before Turning 22
22 Things I Learned Before Turning 22

I’m a believer in constant growth. But so often I feel stagnant and stuck, and it’s only in the looking back that I can see how even the hard, lonely and boring seasons were working things out in me, niggling through me with their magic to reveal truths later, like bluebells nestled under the earth, waiting out winter. I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been learning in the last 12 months; things that hit me brand new, or simply realised with a new depth that hadn’t sunk in before. So here’s a list.

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LifeIssy DaviesFeaturedComment
OUR FAVORITE THINGS: A Playlist for Your Friday
OUR FAVORITE THINGS: A Playlist for Your Friday

As a person who has a playlist for every month, feeling and post-adolescent life event, I was very pleased when That First Year asked me to create one for their Friday Faves series. Friday is a day that tends to bring on a slew of emotions: exhaustion meets excitement, put simply. Friday is day that calls for a two chapter playlist, so I guess that's what we have here. I hope you listen and I hope you enjoy! 

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Our Favorite ThingsLane SasserMusicComment
Making Peace with The Gym
Making Peace with The Gym

I thought paying for exercise was sort of stupid for years. Within my canon of college thoughts that included aspirations of homesteading and going carless, I thought the idea of the gym was backwards—people didn’t need the gym for thousands of years because they exercised in their everyday lives. If we needed to work to pay to exercise instead of just incorporating it in our livelihood—what was that saying about our values? Our lifestyle? Our society? Cue the small existential crisis.

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HealthKirsten WiseFeaturedComment
The Choice Between Digging Deep and Coasting
The Choice Between Digging Deep and Coasting

When I told people I was moving to Belize to volunteer at a Catholic high school, the responses were unique. Some people panicked at the thought of me getting Zika. My parents were shocked, but supported me. Friends were excited for me but also sad, and most of my friends’ parents asked me if it was safe where I would be staying. A select few still don't know where Belize is, or they still think I said Brazil.

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Life, Travel, RelationshipsAlex McGinnisFeaturedComment
I Will Show Up
I Will Show Up

I had never been to a protest before. I had been content, I had been comfortable, I had been quiet in my place of privilege. I had cared, but just enough. I had signed a petition here, donated a few dollars there. I had never acted with any urgency or fear or intention.

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Politics, LifeLiz DeadrickFeaturedComment
My Honest Elevator Pitch
My Honest Elevator Pitch

Although I studied English, I don’t always have a way with words. The scariest question I get is the very first one I am asked on all interviews: Can you tell me about yourself? Although I have my elevator pitch down, I never feel fully satisfied with my answer. In the post-graduate world there is so much more to a person than high school grades and college majors. There is confusion, crying, laughing, drinking, and a lot of second-guessing.

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Career, Dreams, LifeC. CarrollFeaturedComment
On Birthdays and Becoming an Adult
On Birthdays and Becoming an Adult

I turned 23 on a Monday. Twenty-three is that age right on the cusp of true adulthood and nothing says adulthood like having a birthday on a Monday. Twenty-two is forever associated with Taylor Swift and college. Twenty-four sounds like you have a real job with health insurance, or marriage, or at least owning a dog. But 23. It’s just right there in between. Like 11 and 19. What happens when you’re 23? Is it the Cinderella moment? Will my fairy godmother appear and bippity boppity boo! I’m an adult?!

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LifeAndria ModyFeaturedComment
Waking Up
Waking Up

2016 was an election year that changed everything, for myself and for so many others around me. People became divided by their presidential candidates in a heated political climate everyone on every side could call agonizing. Friendships, relationships, and families fell apart. Opinions were turned into angry memes, and after the long-held tradition of keeping your views off social media, finally everybody seemed to know where everybody stood.

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Politics, Life, RelationshipsAmanda BeadlescombFeaturedComment
The Fear of Missing Out
The Fear of Missing Out

I had always thought the “fear of missing out” was that juvenile feeling I got when I was 3 years old and forced to take a nap while my brother, four years my senior, got to play all afternoon. I thought of it as a silly bout of envy that I soon grew out of... until college. My sophomore year, I got my first smart phone. And with it, I excitedly downloaded Instagram.

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Life, RelationshipsHannah ReedFeaturedComment
Finding My Place
Finding My Place

An election happened recently.

As a writer, I have been struggling. I understand the immense privilege I have been afforded in this life of mine—of employment, happiness, a loving family, a stable home. I’m 23 years old and from some standpoints, I know blessed little of suffering. But I have not been able to shake that something about this American election has marked a fundamental transition. The world around me feels different, a little less familiar. I feel so frantic to be informed every day, and to have an opinion, to agree or disagree; yet I’m often too anxious or paralyzed to bear turning on the news.

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Life, PoliticsMelissa WartenFeaturedComment
When You Want to Do Everything
When You Want to Do Everything

I felt like I had transported right back to where I was my senior year, caught in the in-between of trying to hold on so tightly to those last few months of my life as a student, and looking so forward to venturing out of it. But it brought back that old familiar, restless feeling—the same feeling I had when I got back from London, and when I first moved here—of wanting so many things and trying to figure out a way to make them all coexist.

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Life, DreamsAlyssa VottoFeatured Comment
To LSAT or Not to LSAT
To LSAT or Not to LSAT

I don't know if I'm just really unique in this situation, but it seems like everyone knows exactly what they're doing with their lives. Except me. And I know that that's just what people say and what my generation thinks and that society just values traditional careers over non-traditional ones, but you know what? That's just kind of a bummer sometimes. 

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Career, DreamsKatie SerenaFeaturedComment
On Working with Porcelain: Facing the Year Ahead
On Working with Porcelain: Facing the Year Ahead

On the morning of January 1st I wrote down in my journal: “The panic is beginning to set in.”

I love New Year’s Eve; I welcome the new year surrounded by some of my favourite people, the constants in my life. We drink wine and play silly games and laugh our way through midnight. But by January 1st, the familiar feeling arrives. It's like standing at the top of a steep cliff drop; calendar pages splay out tauntingly before me with big red circles, lines and crosses mapping out the things unknown, the things I'm frightened of.

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Dreams, Graduation, LifeIssy DaviesFeaturedComment