My not so roaring twenties (and a book review)

I just finished reading Everything I Know About Love, by Dolly Alderton.

The book is a journey through Dolly’s teens and twenties. It culminates with a chapter called “Everything I know about love at thirty,” which kind of made me scoff a bit when I saw it. Still, I love The High Low, the weekly current affairs podcast Dolly co-hosts with fellow journalist (hers, not mine), Pandora Sykes, so I thought I’d give her Sunday Times bestselling memoir a read.

I have to be honest and say that up until about three quarters of the way through, I really struggled with it. I noticed from page one that I found myself feeling judgey and snide as she recounted her youth and her twenties – the wild parties, the shenanigans and misadventures with her best friend Farly, with whom she is best friends to this day, the anecdotes of living in a shared house and the challenges of finding lasting love.

Then I got to the chapter called ‘Florence’ on page 191 and without leaking any spoilers, I will say that my entire experience of the memoir changed. My heart broke a bit reading the rest of the book. It was wise and profound and insightful and real. I related to a lot of it, and I realised that I had been struggling with the book because I was envious. I was judging the content as shallow and superficial because even though I am so grateful for where my twenties delivered me to (i.e. my thirties!), I still hold a measure of grief about the things I missed out on because of a) being in recovery and b) being socially anxious, often swamped in debilitating shame and fear, and feeling unable to be chaotic lest I return to “the disease of addiction” and ruin my whole fucking life.

It feels like a petty thing, this grief. The world is burning, people are being trafficked, girls are being cut, countless species are facing extinction on a daily basis, and the entire future of our increasingly uninhabitable, sun-orbiting rock hangs in the balance. But there is still this pain, this sadness as I look back on the decade in which I often felt so incredibly lost and so peer-less – with friends, but without proper girlfriends, with community but a community made up of people battling and wrestling their demons, with a guidebook for living, but one that was written in the 1930s by two chronic old male alcoholics in recovery plus another book channeled in the 1970s. There is still this sense of loss.

I struggled with Dolly’s book because while I read in a spiritual personal development book that your twenties are an extension of your adolescence, a time for experimentation and playing with your identity and trying to find your way in the world, the reality for me was that the bulk of my twenties were spent immersed in personal development, spirituality and trying to heal trauma. While others were nursing hangovers, I was sitting on the number 14 bus heading to Chelsea and Westminster hospital for a 9am meeting of Overeaters Anonymous, trying desperately to get through the day without buying a bag of food and bingeing on it in secret, putting it in the bin and then taking it out of the bin and eating it. I used to have to pour washing up liquid on the food to stop myself from eating it once I’d thrown it away. I would stare at the Fairy liquid drenched food in the bin and wonder if I could eat any of it without getting sick. That was my life, and it was a sad, lonely and often desperate thing.

While my would-be peers were out at the pub or at quiz nights or going to Glastonbury Festival or nightclubs or generally making the most of living in London, I was flaking out on plans and choosing to stay in the comfort zone of my bedroom, or, if I did go out, I’d spend the night feeling self-conscious and paranoid. There were no themed birthday parties apart from the “grown up children”’s themed party I had where a small group of recovery friends came round and played Twister in my dad’s garden. I had no hen do when I got engaged. I was never a bridesmaid to a friend because I had very few friends in their twenties. I didn’t apply to graduate schemes because I didn’t feel good enough. I didn’t do the ‘voluntourism’ thing because I just didn’t feel that was even an option for my life. I closed the door on one opportunity after another. It was a painful time. I spent an inordinate number of hours in church halls, weighing and measuring the food I was eating so as not to binge, phoning a sponsor in the morning to tell her exactly what i planned on eating that day, or doing twelve step work. I married my husband with no plan for our future, no joint dreams other than to maybe cycle Lands End to John O’Groats and one day ‘teach the work’ together. And I always, always, always felt like I was behind where I should be.

True, there was a one month adventure in New Zealand when I was 22, but that was followed by getting sucked into a church in Sydney where I stayed, vulnerable, taken advantage of and anxious about leaving, for ten months. This resulted in me not travelling around Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and India, which was my original plan.

As I look back, I feel sad at how I spent all that time, and why I was so afraid to just go for it.

I’m also grateful – of course I am - for the work I did and the relationships I forged with some incredible people. People who are doing the work on themselves are some of the bravest, most inspiring people you’ll ever encounter. I saw inside men’s and women’s prisons from doing twelve step fellowship service; I met recovering addicts in Ibiza and obscure towns in New Zealand and learned that I could connect with people from all walks of life. I spent every single day of my twenties stone cold sober - every single one. There were no hangovers, no blackouts, and no vomiting from drinking too much.

And don’t get me wrong, I still made stupid mistakes (mostly involving men) that I hope to God I won’t ever make again. A highlight was a phone call I received one morning from the girlfriend of a guy I’d slept with without a condom. She called me a slag and asked me if I had AIDS. Charming. (And no, I didn’t know that he had a girlfriend.)

Inside me today, I can feel a wannabe reckless twenty-one-year-old who just wants to go out, snog a couple of randoms, puke in the street and not feel like doing this is proof that she needs rehab.

My twenties gave me some really cool experiences, too. Nothing is ever black and white. I danced a lot of 5Rhythms and went to Esalen, the place where the practice originated. I tried a lot of therapies and had powerful, life-changing experiences. I worked with hundreds of English students from around the world as their English teacher and learned that impact comes from relationship, not from a job title.

But I also spent so many weekends alone in a garden centre while my ex worked in a cafe. I’d sit and look at the old people eating scones and would read the BBC Science magazine and would just wait for him to finish his shift. I moved to a village where next to nothing ever happened. I chickened out on going travelling and didn’t see any of the places on my list: South America, South East Asia, India. I quit a number of jobs with incredible prospects because I was so overwhelmed by the daunting task of taking on responsibility and believing in myself.

As I read Dolly Alderton’s book, a wave of grief washed over me, gentle yet powerful. I know today’s post is close to the bone because I’m on the edge of tears as I write this. I have regrets. I know that it’s pointless to have them in the end, and that now is all we really have, and that I had the experiences I was meant to have to get me to this point. But I have to tell you that I wish it had been different. I wish I had been less imprisoned by shame, that I had been more socially confident, that I had been more adventurous, that I had felt capable of going after what I wanted. Actually, strike that: I didn’t know how to let myself even DREAM about what I wanted, let alone actually try to live a life where those things came to pass. I never even let myself fucking dream. It was just too… unimaginable, somehow.

Now, at 36 and a half, that dreaming is in full flow. The dreams I have nowadays are of simple things. I dream of a home, a family, of fairly tame ‘adventures’ that feel adventurous to me. I dream of the kind of things that I think many women in their late thirties dream about. I know that my twenties are gone, and that I’ll never be able to get them back. I know, from reading Dolly’s book, that even when people live their twenties ‘perfectly’, that youth is wasted on the young. And I know that there are far, far more important things happening in the world, and that my life today is FULL of things to be inexpressibly grateful for.

But that’s the thing about being human. All of these knowings can co-exist, and today in me, they do.

My life in my twenties felt necessary, but it also felt small in ways that feel important and sad. Today, for whatever reason, I’m grieving that.

One thought stands in my mind, bright and comforting. I think if my twenty-four year old self could see me today, if she in all her wild fear and overwhelm and shame and struggle with herself, could meet me now, she would be really fucking relieved to know how things work out so far. Because it is kind of like what they said in recovery – I do feel like I’ve been given a life beyond my wildest dreams. Not because my dreams were so wild, but because living this ordinary, extraordinary life is far, far better than imagining it. Being here, with the people I have in my life, with the evening I have just lived, is far greater than what I think my twenty-something-year-old frightened mind could conceive of.

For that, and for you, for the ability to write and express myself and for this moment, I am grateful.

Thank you, as always, for reading what I have to share. It means a huge amount to me.

(Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash. Thank you.)