Why Am I Mourning My Twenties While I Am Still Young?
The Pattern
You are thirty-one. You are thirty-four. You are twenty-nine and counting down. You are mourning your twenties even though you have years of life ahead of you, and people keep telling you to relax because you are still young. The relax is not landing. The grief is real. You are not being ridiculous. You are mourning a particular psychological position, the one where everything was still hypothetical, where every choice felt reversible, where the future had no shape and that shapelessness was a kind of freedom. That position is closing. The closing is a real loss, and pretending it is not real does not make it less real.
Origins & Context
James Hollis, in his work on the second half of life, describes the felt transition out of provisional living as one of the most underestimated griefs of early adulthood. Hollis notes that the twenties are typically lived in a mode of becoming, in which every decision is provisional. The thirties and forties bring the recognition that some decisions have, by accumulation, become real. The grief is not for what was lost but for the loss of the provisional state itself.
Karen Pope's writing on the developmental tasks of women in midlife describes the specific mourning of the unfixed self. Pope notes that women are often taught to remain unfixed, available for revision, well into their thirties, and the moment of recognition that the revision window is closing is a real psychological event that deserves its own ritual.
You are mourning a particular psychological position, the one where everything was still hypothetical, where every choice felt reversible.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the small panic of seeing photos from a decade ago. The face that looks back at you is so unfinished, so open, and you feel both tender and panicked, because she did not know what was going to happen and you are the one who knows now.
It shows up in the over-correction. You start trying to recapture the openness through small reckless gestures. You take a trip. You change your hair. You quit something. The gestures help and they do not help, because the openness was not a thing you did. It was a structural feature of being twenty-five.
It shows up in the friend group conversations that have started getting wistful. Everyone references the apartment, the city, the era. The era is becoming mythological. You notice the mythologizing and you feel its function. The myth is the container for the grief.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the End of Provisional Living (James Hollis), the developmental transition out of the open-ended self of early adulthood. It is also named as Premature Anticipatory Mourning, the grief that arrives in advance of a felt loss. The specific feminine version of this is sometimes named the Closing Window.
Related entries in this library: Complex Grief, Healing Is Direction Not Destination, Adaptive Self vs Original Self.
Nikita's Note
The grief is allowed to be early. The grief does not need permission from anyone else. The closing of the twenties is real, and you are right to notice it.
The practice is to let the grief teach you something instead of trying to wave it away. What did the twenties version of you have that you want to keep? What did she have that you are relieved to have left behind? Let the mourning sort the inheritance. The thirties are not a worse decade. They are a different one. You are allowed to grieve the previous one and still arrive in this one with your whole self.
From the work
You are mourning a particular psychological position, the one where everything was still hypothetical, where every choice felt reversible.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.