Top Ten Twenties Takeaways

When I turned twenty-nine last week, I took some time to journal and see how much I could remember from the last ten years that I’ve been in my twenties. 

My twenties felt like a marathon. 

My twenties felt like a long nightmare about me running a marathon. 

I documented every major plot point that I could remember, including Calvin, breakups, flings, long-term relationships, jobs, theatre shows, films, travels, health scares, surgeries, setbacks, weddings, roommates, friends, friend groups, habits, routines, haircuts, fashion phases, regrets, places I’ve lived… And throughout this exercise, I started to see some patterns, as well as recall when big emotional developments happened for me. Then, I listed the main “lesson” that I felt like I learned from each year. 

2016, I turned 20: Busyness does not equal meaning 

When I was at Calvin, I double-majored in theatre and religion and minored in philosophy. I was a senator on student council, was voted onto the theatre board, served four years on the traffic violations and campus safety committee, worked in the student life division, was the coordinator for commuter life, took eighteen to twenty credit hours consistently, and was always in at least two to three theatre productions at a time (between performing, designing, and/or directing), reaching a total of thirty-six productions overall by the time I left Calvin (including collegiate, community, and pre-professional productions). As much as I knew that this was my time to hustle, to build the resume, and to gain the experience, a huge part of me tied my worth to my productivity. This would set me on an unhealthy workaholic path for a few years, but this is when I started to learn that lesson.

2017, I turned 21: Suffering is not a virtue 

I had a really unhealthy understanding of “pick up your cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24-26). I thought that if I was unhappy in life, that if I was completely sacrificial and selfless all the time, that if I embraced discomfort and didn’t care about my own needs ever being met—essentially, if I was constantly suffering silently—then it meant that I was a good, strong Christian. The more pain I could bear, the more like Christ I would become. However, I accidentally equated that to mean that being like Jesus was like being a doormat. This interpretation prevented me from developing a strong sense of self (even in Christ),  made it difficult for me to set boundaries, and gave me a detrimental relationship with my emotions—teaching me to interpret all pain as positive, rather than recognizing that it can also be a tool that tells you when something is wrong and that you need to course-correct. Self-respect and self-care are not selfish. 

2018, I turned 22: “It’s fine” is not “I forgive you”

I never, ever, in a million years thought that I wasn’t a forgiving person. Anytime somebody wronged me, I never shamed them, never yelled at them, never got angry… I never wanted anybody to feel badly. I would assure them, “It’s okay! It’s fine! It’s really not a big deal!” It was very difficult for me to learn that “excusing” someone was not the same as “forgiving” them. By saying “it’s fine,” my brain was secretly storing all kinds of suppressed offenses in my body. By saying “I forgive,” my spirit was releasing the offense from storage. Trying to protect people from my own emotions caused me to accidentally disregard them myself. After years of excusing rather than forgiving people, a deep well of unexpressed hurt, anger, and injustice built up inside me. I decided it would be beneficial to try and start learning how to express my anger in healthy, unexplosive, and manageable ways. I dipped my toe into the well, and a dam broke. Years of feeling overlooked, unheard, unseen, misunderstood, belittled, unappreciated, and bullied came spilling out over everyone and everything. Anger was a new emotion for me, and I didn’t like it at all; I didn’t like the heat I felt in my body, I didn’t like how my mind filled up with steam… But suddenly I had no control over any of it. My misplaced anger got taken out on a number of things, and a number of people. It took me over a year for that broken dam to finally run into a river, before settling down altogether. But the damage was done, some of which I’m still trying to rebuild to this day. 

2019, I turned 23: People are not projects 

After I graduated from Calvin, I moved straight to Chicago and started my internship at Chicago Children’s Theatre. Suddenly, I was out of the “Calvin Bubble.” I stayed in Chicago after the summer ended and started auditioning and applying for other local theatre gigs. However, whatever space I found myself in, and whoever I found myself talking to, I found that I always had an immense amount of pressure on my chest that even sometimes caused difficulty breathing. I was constantly grilling myself, “How can I bring up Jesus in this conversation; I don’t think this person knows Jesus; how can I bring up Jesus…” Sharing one’s faith is beautiful; but for me, it came out of a place of fear rather than joy. I heard the Bible verse in my head, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory…” (Luke 9:26). I was so desperately afraid of appearing “ashamed” of Jesus, that if I didn’t try to convert every single person I knew, then I determined that I must not really be on fire for the Lord. I found that I couldn’t even listen to people because I was so busy thinking of how I was going to evangelize to them. I was seeing people as projects. 

2020, I turned 24: Outgrow your box

I drove back from Chicago one weekend to grab coffee with a friend in Grand Rapids. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so I was excited to catch up. I heard all about how he was growing his business, what he was doing about the subfloors in his house, et cetera… And I told him all about how I had gained a lot more confidence as a person, how I was learning to set healthy boundaries, and to be more assertive in areas where I used to be very submissive. As I talked, I became a little uncomfortable as I saw his jaw clench and his lips purse—even as he sipped his coffee. When I was done, he said, “Mm…that just…doesn’t sound like you. I just hope you don’t lose who you are.” Later, alone in my car, I replayed our conversation in my head and started second-guessing all the ways I had been working on my character—and that’s when I learned that some people don’t want you to change, even if it’s for the better. Some people just want you to stay in the box that they know and understand you in. But that’s when I decided that I want friends who encourage my growth, are proud of me, and who don’t want to keep me tethered to the way they are used to experiencing me.

2021, I turned 25: People are people

There once existed a huge chasm in my mind between believers and non-believers. Having grown up in the church, in a Christian home, in a Christian community, attending private Christian schools, and a Christian university, where I studied Christian theology—the majority of my acquaintances and circles have always been Christian. Non-Christians felt mysterious and threatening. But when I went through a traumatic event in Chicago, I witnessed all the people who surrounded me with love, support, and care—people. Not Christians or non-Christians, people. And I watched in awe as one of my non-Christian coworkers—who would later become my best friend—loved people more sacrificially, authentically, and like Jesus than just about anyone I had ever seen. These instances and more taught me that what was actually important was choosing to be around people who were pursuing the “Heart of God”: everything that Jesus embodies. Searching for the Heart of God just as we search for the treasure in the field (Matthew 13:44) is more valuable to me than superficially classifying oneself as “Christian” or “not.” Truth is truth, and people are people. 

2022, I turned 26: Such a shame 

“Shame” is the word that surrounds my creative process. It’s due to a deep misrepresentation of art within the evangelical culture, which stresses that art (or any creative activity) is meant to be worshipful. I don’t always see art as a means of worship. Additionally, Christians are constantly being hit with the question, “How are you serving God with your talents?” This is a great question, and an important one to ask; however, I don’t think that I always need to “serve God” with my art, either. Often, art (or a creative activity) is an expression of the self; everything from joy to pain to apathy. Like the psalms, it can be an expression of doubt, fears, and questions—not inherently worshipful, but vital to the Christian life nonetheless. Art can be a conversation, or a cry. By encouraging it as only a means of worship or in servitude of God, I believe we make Christian art cartoonish and more like propaganda. I always struggled with shame in my creative process because I didn’t think God wanted me to be seen; I thought I was supposed to disappear in my art, and make it all about him. But then I learned that creativity is the expression of the very self that I was taught to abandon, and that God wants to see me. It’s just such a shame that so many Christian artists feel they have to hide. 

2023, I turned 27: Romance is real  

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud…it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered…” I know this verse by heart. These are all actionable things I’ve worked on implementing since I was a child. I always thought I knew exactly what love was: “For God so loved the world,” right? “Greater love knows none other than this,” right? Love was “unconditional.” Love was God, God was Love. The kind of “love” you hear about in Disney movies or whatever—that kind of love isn’t real; it’s just “the flesh,” and infatuation. “Falling in love” is foolish, immature, and even ungodly. Love is duty. Love is difficult. Love is a covenant—not enjoyed. Or at least, that’s what I was conditioned to believe. So when I finally fell in love, I didn’t even realize it was happening to me. Suddenly, there was a whole new face to love that I had never seen before. Suddenly, I felt like I was cozy at home while simultaneously being on a wild adventure. Love, for the first time, wasn’t a duty, an obligation, or a “calling” or anything like that—love was as simple as a roadtrip, a burnt home-cooked meal, or a nighttime walk. 

2024, I turned 28: Just hit “submit” 

I was meeting my mom and sister at the mall to do some shopping for my sister’s birthday. It was one of those rare occasions where I was—shockingly—early. I sat in my car and finished listening to a podcast episode from Jeff Goins, author of one of my favorite books, Real Artists Don’t Starve. He was talking about how, when he was twenty-eight, he decided that he was finally going to become a writer. It made me think about all the many jobs I was juggling at the time, and all the many jobs I had been applying to (and getting rejected from). I decided I wasn’t going to waste any more time. Writing was the thing I’d always done consistently and always loved the most. It was right there in my car, on that snowy day in March, that I decided, “I’m a writer”—and then I just started doing it. I took a leap of faith and joined Jeff Goins and several other writers on a retreat in Oxford to work on our manuscripts. That was the summer I auditioned and got accepted to write for the post calvin. It was also the summer I submitted an abstract about my research on George MacDonald and the craft of acting and got accepted to present my paper at the conference at the University of St. Andrews. The debilitating imposter syndrome was a frequent mental block, but I just had to keep reminding myself, “I am a writer, I am a writer,” and just keep hitting “submit.”  

2025, I turned 29: Don’t give up 

My twenties were largely spent throwing metaphorical spaghetti against the wall and waiting to see what “career” stuck. Between theatre, acting, film, design, painting, production, dance, teaching, music, comedy, and writing, I was all over the place and didn’t know where to land. Though I never really knew why, I just knew I needed to keep doing this one thing: keep writing every single day, keep your skills sharp… It was often debilitating and confusing, not feeling like I had a north star to orient myself towards, but I knew that if I just stayed faithful, then when the opportunities finally came, I would be ready. And that’s exactly what’s happened.