How to Live in Your Twenties

Guest Letter

(From the love letters to literature essay contest winner.)

October 28th, 2025

Dear Reader,

A purpose to grow. That's everything you need to know by twenty. Repeat to yourself the comfort phrase: there's no need to figure it out.

And it's true. At twenty, all you need is a reason to become something to stretch toward, whether as small as feeling your lungs fill or as enormous as living in an apartment in New York. It need not be permanent; it only needs to be a reason to live, not merely survive.

Different dreams are not lesser dreams.

Yearn.

Yearn for someone, or for something. Yearn even if you think you don't deserve it.

Yearning makes you live for someone or something and we need that. Love and yearning are strangers that share the same room: love holds you close, but yearning waits.

I would rather be yearned for than merely loved, because yearning is patient. It is hope. It is the faint light that appears even when you do not want to see it, when you feel unable to. Yearn to touch her hair, to stand before the most astronomical view of New York, to inhale autumn air in Switzerland.

These are not distant fantasies; they are the small, searing wants that keep you moving

Dream.

Dream big, or don't bother at all. What harm is there in dreaming? A dream may arrive, or it may dissolve before it reaches you, but that's not the point. The point is to dream as a dream deserves to be dreamt-without limits, without calculations, without trimming it down to what feels safe.

When you dream, you call something into being. You manifest a possibility, and that is how it begins to take shape. It doesn't matter how long it lingers in the distance, or how impossible it seems to anyone else. That is the essence of a dream, it lives beyond reason, beyond the neat boxes of what feels realistic.

Because if it is realistic, then it isn't a dream at all. It's a goal, measurable, achievable, ordinary.

Dreams are not meant to be ordinary. They are meant to be vast enough to scare you, bright enough to blind you, and fragile enough to slip through your hands if you don't hold them close.

So dream without apology. Dream until it feels absurd. Dream until the world tells you it cannot be done, and then dream it louder.

Because even if the dream itself shifts or breaks, the act of dreaming is what keeps you alive what keeps you moving toward something greater than survival.

Wait.

Life is beautiful and infuriating. It refuses to align with plans. When it gives me what I want, I sometimes do not want it; when I let go, it begs me back. I was raised with a script my life planned in tidy acts because I am, in small ways, Amy March. So when things derail, I splinter. I have broken twice: once for love, once for dreams.

And yet, breaking has been a privilege. When I shattered I lay on the floor and cut out the part of my heart that ached, because I had lost so much. I lived in a world where destiny felt ordained, and then was taken. Like a child on the playground, her candy ripped from trembling hands.

Tears fell as if my wings were clipped as if Maleficent herself had folded them away and everything I had wanted vanished, leaving me small.

Still I call it privilege. Because to be able to dream so large is a gift. To grieve so fiercely is proof that you have loved with an enormous capacity. It is a rare thing to sit in the hollow and still yearn.

Live.

Drink every ounce. Take every sip. Life is not meant to be measured in the safety of half-steps or the comfort of untouched waters.

It is meant to be consumed, savored, even spilled recklessly at times. To live fully is to risk breaking, because only in breaking do we discover how deeply we once cared, how fully we once belonged to a moment, a dream, or a person.

If you have never been shattered, you have not been passionate enough. Shattered does not always mean defeated; it means you dared to open yourself wide enough for life to enter, with all its joy and all its ache. Passion does not guarantee triumph it guarantees that you showed up to life with your entire being, heart first, defenses second. And that kind of living will always leave a mark.

If you have never been passionate enough, you have not truly lived, you have only survived.

Survival is mechanical. It is waking up, breathing, and doing only what is necessary to continue breathing. Living, on the other hand, is reckless in its beauty. It is chasing the dream that terrifies you, confessing the love that might not be returned, failing gloriously, laughing until you can't breathe, and crying until you feel hollow but strangely whole.

And life, my friend, is too brief to spend in surviving. One day the clock will stop, and all that will remain are the moments when you chose to live beyond safety when you chose to drink every ounce and take every sip. So do not wait for certainty or permission. Break a little. Heal a lot. Love recklessly. Fail loudly. Rise proudly. And most of all live, because surviving will never be enough.