I got married and started my career young. When I got divorced and quit my job, I compared myself to others.
My parents always encouraged me to be myself. Still, I somehow picked up the belief that there's a "right" way and a "wrong" way to do life and that the right way means doing things in a certain order.
I believed that your early 20s were the only time it was perfectly acceptable (and perhaps even adorable) to be a hot mess, while your late 20s were for taking the first steps toward getting "old and boring" — getting married, getting serious about a career, the whole nine yards.
But even with this steadfast belief, I still did things out of order. Or so I thought.
I got married and started my career by 25, but neither worked out
By 25, I already had a full year of being "old and boring" under my belt. I was married and a project manager at a PR company. I was ahead of the curve of where I thought I should be in terms of stability and normality.
However, I was also learning that life wasn't for me.
Getting married quickly in my early 20s turned into getting an agonizingly slow divorce in my late 20s. It was only then that I finally started to understand what "forever" actually means, and that it would not be comfortable for me to spend that much time with someone I was fundamentally incompatible with.
There I was, 28 and suddenly single, watching engagement announcements crop up all over my Instagram feed, like fungus after a rainstorm. I felt washed up, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, though I had yet to reach the age where you adopt a monkey and an all-caftan wardrobe.
It turned out PR also wasn't for me, and I was both out of a job and a husband. Now single and living alone, my bills had doubled while my income was nonexistent. I had to Scotch tape together my living, like when I was fresh out of college — except this time, I was proficient in Microsoft Project (and burned out on using it). I needed both money and a change, so I answered a somewhat questionable call for hair models on LA Casting. Fortunately, it turned out to be legit.
I didn't even know hair modeling was a thing until I did it. I thought you could only model clothes and hands. But there I was, stumbling into a modeling career in my late 20s, when most "real" models were hitting retirement. Another milestone hit in reverse.
I often compared myself to my best friend
The year before my divorce, my best friend from growing up had gotten married. At the same time that I felt as though I was doing things backward, she was hitting life milestones"the right way" with almost textbook-level precision.
In fact, the weekend of her wedding was when I first started wondering about my compatibility with my own husband, and if we truly had to be bound by "I do" forever. Just after my divorce, she and her husband bought a house in the suburbs while I lived in a studio apartment I could barely afford. And at the beginning of my modeling career, I found out she was pregnant when I was on Bourbon Street, partying it up with other models after a giant hair modeling gig I had been flown out to New Orleans for.
Next to my best friend, I felt as though I looked like a train wreck. Bleaching my hair and posting "hot modeling photos" on Instagram right after a divorce didn't scream stable. But that messy exterior was really a cocoon as I transformed into something more majestic than a butterfly — myself.
I'm glad things happened the way they did
It was hard for me not to compare myself to someone who seemed to have the perfect life, especially when I was fully submerged in the unavoidable chaos of change. But having every inch of my life explode was worth it.
Now, I have a career that suits me, a great partner, and I live in an apartment with more than one room. But most importantly, I'm happy, because my life is what I want it to be, not what I arbitrarily feel it "should" be. If I had the choice to Freaky Friday with my best friend, I wouldn't trade places for anything.
I had believed growing up that your early 20s are for making mistakes, before you finally figure out what you want your life to look like, and in some ways, that is what I did. Setting up a life that wasn't right for me — and then getting out of it — was a mistake, sure, but it helped me get to where I am now.
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