the infancy and decrepitude of turning 27
being in your twenties is just constantly feeling like you're too old and too young
There are 3 things in pop culture that I think about when I think of turning 27.
An informal list of artists, actors, and musicians who have died at the age of 27 due to suicide, drug overdose, or violence. Notable “members” include Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, and Jean-Michele Basquiat. A similar list of celebrities who died before the age of 30 has also made the rounds, with entries from Selena Quintanilla Perez, Aaliyah, and Ritchie Valens. The most recent is actor Angus Cloud, who died at 26 from an overdose containing fentanyl, the exact same age and cause of death as Mac Miller (whom many say Cloud is strikingly similar to, making it all the more eery and tragic).


I felt ready to turn 25. I had made it halfway through my twenties and while I still felt like I had wasted my time and was comparing myself to those around me, I was content. I told myself I’d live out the rest of my twenties reaching for the change I was always so afraid to seek.
I was hesitant to turn 26 (as if I had a choice in the matter). The reality of adulthood swung over my head like a weight held up by a fraying rope. When I turned 26 I was determined that by 27, my life would look a lot different. I’d be making decent money from freelancing or suck it up and get a regular job and maybe my novel would be finished. Still processing my first heartbreak at the time, I imagined I’d finally go on dates again and maybe even have a lover. I’d be super smart and sexy and the mature woman I’d envisioned myself as.
Now that I’m actually here, I am dreading turning 27. I have done none of the things I mentioned above. I feel inexperienced, inadequate, unprepared, and hopeless. The rope has broken, the weight has dropped, and I can’t breathe. I feel this intense need to grow up overnight and catch up to where I’m supposed to be, where the rest of my peers are, hell, where people younger than me are. Because if I don’t, no one is going to take me seriously. But, as has been the running theme of my life, I am scared, so I do everything I can to avoid it. I’m not the only one with this fear, though, and I’m beginning to think–no, to know–that still thinking and acting like this makes me pathetic.
In my experience, once you turn 25, whoever is in control of your universe presses the fast-forward button on their remote. I’m not just in my twenties anymore, I’m in my mid-twenties, which feels like that scene from Freaky Friday (2003) when Jamie Lee Curtis does her best impersonation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream as she shouts, “I’m old. Oh, I’m like the Crypt Keeper!” Every second past the age of 25 is like a ticking clock that I feel deep in my skin. When I was little, my twenties seemed like a far-off concept. I thought I’d be chasing my dreams in some big city, proving to everyone how uber-successful and talented I am. I thought I’d have my own apartment and travel the world and some boy would utterly adore me. The older I got, the smaller the dreams became, partially out of the fact that I had to accept reality and partially out of the fact that making my dreams smaller made them seem less frightening. If I reached for less, the failure would hurt less. Of course, my fatal character flaw, even the smallest of dreams has remained so because I’ve done nothing to achieve them. I know my therapist will disagree with this. I’m chipping away little by little but it’s not enough and I can’t help feeling like I’ve wasted all of this time and I can’t even complain about it because it’s my own fault. If I had spent the past decade making better choices, and facing my fears and anxieties, I could be somewhere by now.
One of my favorite high school teachers told me, “You have until 27 to get your shit together.” I feel that I’ve disappointed him. When I visited my mom’s hometown a few weeks ago, we took a tour of her old high school and I started feeling nostalgic for a time that had great moments but was also absolute hell. Because I know I’m not actually nostalgic for my high school experience, I’m nostalgic for the idea of starting over, of living up to the potential everyone said I had, of correcting the choices I’ve made in the time since. While on the tour, I pictured the graduates from my own high school who would come back to visit all the time because they had nothing better to do and how much I didn’t want to be like them. But in a way, I kind of am. I told my therapist the other day, with a dry laugh, that I don’t think I ever got over the trauma of graduating high school. I never have been good at dealing with major changes, and I was dealt 3 major changes the summer I graduated. Logically, I know there are much bigger things at play here and I wouldn’t actually go back to high school if given the chance but I think about it a lot when I’m feeling ashamed and down on myself.
Everyone has had their “I want to be young again” moment but Millennials and Gen Z have cornered the market on this. Besides being the generations that are reaching milestones later in life (or not at all), we’ve made it into all kinds of trends, most notably the “I hate adulting”, “I’m just a girl” and “twenty-something teenage girl” phrases. We’re also the generations that have been more vocal about mental health issues, our struggles with moving from adolescence into adulthood, and the crushing weight of living in a capitalist hellscape of a world that we never asked to be born into. The concept of adulthood used to excite me, then the closer I got to it, the more it scared me. I fear accepting the reality of being an adult means accepting that I’ll be miserable all in the name of survival.
But that’s just it. There’s no one way to be an adult anymore. Obviously, there are objective things about it, like earning money and taking care of various responsibilities, but we aren’t locked into one means of survival like we used to be, especially women. Charlotte in Pride and Prejudice is considered a spinster at the age of 27 and must find a husband in order to support her family, who are struggling financially. That was her only option as a white woman in 1800s England. She ends up marrying someone, not for love, but for survival and arranges her schedule so that she doesn’t even look at the man she married more than she has to. Ilana in Broad City is the total opposite of that. She’s happy with her life and relationships but she’s not ready to make any big changes or commitments yet, and she has the option to do so because that’s how much our world has changed since the days of Pride and Prejudice.
The quotes from Charlotte and Ilana regularly make the rounds on social media and I feel they perfectly capture how we’re all feeling, and especially how I’m feeling. Most days I feel like the Charlotte quote, ashamed of the fact that I literally am 27 with no money and no prospects, a burden to my aging parents who clearly didn’t expect me to still be living with them. I feel like a failure (even though I’ve hardly begun, it’s also been long enough that I feel ashamed for not being further along than I am) and I’m frightened of a future that I am not prepared for. And most days I feel like the Ilana quote; I am just a girl! A child! I don’t know what I’m doing and trying to figure it out is scary. I don’t want to be locked into a future I hate via marriage, family, or work.
Even though the concept of the 27 Club is a bit dramatic for this post, seeing as I’ve been lucky enough to personally avoid substance abuse, suicide, and violence, the topic has always fascinated me. Despite everything I said above that proves the contrary, I do feel lucky to make it to 27. I’m the youngest in my family on both my parent’s sides and not only that, I’m the youngest by 8 years, so I’ve had no close relations to experience growth with. I’ve watched all my older cousins move through the typical milestones of life and feel more ashamed everywhere that I am not where they were at my age. Every year I get older is a reminder to everyone that the baby of the family is not a baby anymore even though I very much feel like it.
27 will also mark the beginning of the fact that I will now surpass my oldest cousin, Alireza, in age. He just had a birthday and while I was visiting family, I visited his box (he’s cremated) on my aunt’s shelf to pay my respects. I wondered what he’d be like by now if he had been given the chance to make it to 27 and beyond. He seemed so old to me when I was a kid; I was intimidated by his age and how tall he was and the fact that he was a boy (we don’t have many of those in my family). Now I realize that’s just it: he was a boy. He was 26! 26 is so young and so is 27.
The darkly fascinating aspect of the 27 Club is how talented every member was when their lives were violently cut short. How many movies or albums or paintings would they have gone on to create if they had lived? Or maybe they felt they had already reached their full potential and couldn’t keep living up to society’s expectations. Either way, I don’t have as much talent in my whole body as they did in a single finger but I still have time to hone my talent and work to make it something I can live off of. Even though this past year has been full of heartache, confusion, self-questioning, and self-doubt, and I am scared and lost on what kind of place I can make for myself in the world, there has also been self-discovery, love, and new beginnings. I do like who I am now (for the most part) and I know that who I am now would not have materialized if I had done things differently in the past–as this post and basically my entire Substack has been proof of, sometimes I view this notion positively and other times it drags me down. I still have time to make my place in the world, whatever it may be. But I can’t help it: the universal remote is still on fast-forward, the clock ticks still prick my skin and penetrate every thought I have, a constant undercurrent to my daily life.
I am 27 and I feel like a decrepit infant. How can I find a balance? When will I feel caught up? Ask me when I’m 28.
I wrote an essay on a similar topic earlier this year, “the feminine urge to have lived a full life by 25” if you’re interested. I also recommend “Why Do Girls Cry On Their Birthday?” by
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I feel this so hard. I was very hesitant to turn 24 this year because I'm now officially in my mid-twenties. When I was 23, I felt like I could kinda spin it to convince myself and others that I was technically still in my early-twenties because I had a whole year separating me from 25. But now that buffer is gone and so are all my rationalizations.🥲 However, I'm trying to switch my mindset surrounding birthdays and getting older to being more excited about discovering the person I'll become in the future. But it's hard to just suddenly start thinking this way after years of thinking and feeling another way.
Thank you so much for sharing this <3 I really resonated with so much of it. And I hope you had a lovely birthday!🥳