- When talking to people who are teenaged or younger, I am no longer in my “cool” twenties. I’m in my “old” twenties.
- I keep a fastidious household budget.
- I enjoy keeping a fastidious household budget.
- I have three Pinterest boards dedicated to cleaning and organizing a house I don’t own.
- My friends and I get to the bar at eight and leave by ten because “the music is getting loud.”
- I am beginning to worry that the foods I eat will give me heartburn.
- I am beginning to worry that the foods I eat are high in cholesterol.
- Two or three times a week, I consider getting a copy of my credit report, just to ease my mind.
- I bought curtains. And matching throw pillows.
- “Seasonal decorations” no longer just means a two-foot Christmas tree with a party hat and some lights taped up by the window. I have boxes in the basement dedicated to “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall,” and exactly zero of my three Christmas tress look tacky.
- I use words like “tacky” unironically.
- I’ve gone to wedding showers.
- I’ve gone to baby showers. Without my mother.
- I eat breakfast because it jumpstarts my metabolism.
- I am keenly aware of things like my metabolism.
- Last week, I caught myself in the middle of a sentence that started with “Kids these days—“
- I dust.
- I watch documentaries for fun.
- I still have some posters hanging up that I bought in college, but I have since put them into frames.
- I’ve seriously considered getting a gym membership. Because of my metabolism.
- I’ve decided that a gym membership just isn’t in the cards for us yet. Because of our fastidious household budget.
- I’ve said the words, “I haven’t done that in, like, fifteen years” about something that I have distinct memories of doing.
- I’m grateful that my age almost always lines up with the last digit of the calendar year, because otherwise I’d forget how old I am.
- I had a mini panic attack when I found out a lot of really excellent celebrities are younger than me—Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Taylor Swift (by five days).
- I get really excited when I meet really excellent people who are older than me—people I admire and respect and want to emulate in some way—because it reminds me that being twenty-fivec does not mean I am “finished.” I look forward to getting older. Every day brings me farther and farther away from those awful decisions I made back in my early twenties.
Yet to come: being able to say “back in my early twenties” without sounding like a fool.
Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.
