Being a writer in your 20s

Your 20s are loud, aren’t they? Messy. Unexpected. And in the middle of it all, you sit with your fingers all over the keyboard, or your pen bleeding across a journal. A writer. In your twenties.

There’s something about being a young writer. The world tells you that you are either too early or already late. But in your mind, there is only the next line. The next story. The next unsent poem saved in your Notes app at 2:14 AM.

You write about strangers on trains, burnt coffee, and conversations you wish you had, and sometimes, wish you never had. You carry notebooks in your tote bags and dreams in your drafts folder. You read everything and nothing at once. You are a writer. In your twenties.

It’s not as romantic or poetic as I am making it out to be, though. Sometimes, you just don’t make good art and you end up being a little invisible. Do your words really matter in a world of scrolling thumbs and shrinking attention spans?

It’s alright. Your 20s are not about being a published writer. You experiment. You erase. You edit yourself, not just on the page, but in life. You let your characters be flawed. You let yourself be flawed. You write stories that are half truth, half fiction, and yet fully yours.

Being a writer is lonely. Especially when you are the only one you know trying to turn feelings into form. Your friends work corporate jobs. They talk in spreadsheets and sales goals. You don’t. You envy their stability. They envy your passion. And so, you become your own companion and fall in love with dead poets or fictional men.

No one tells you how deeply your words will move people you will never meet.

No one tells you that strangers will write to you, saying, “I needed this.”

No one tells you how it feels to turn your pain into poetry.

No one tells you how much strength it takes to keep writing when nothing is certain.

Because this is how you become the writer you are meant to be. 

Write badly. Write bravely. Write without knowing what will come of it. After all, you are a writer. In your twenties.

There’s always a half-empty cup of coffee beside your laptop, now cold, but comforting, like a friend that stayed too long. You write a line, then backspace it. You stare out the window, hoping the rain might say something profound. And when the right words arrive, they don’t come loud. They land like a sigh. Just you, your thoughts, and the privacy of a blank page that is yet to be filled.

Read books that make you jealous. Befriend silence. Romanticise commas and deadlines. Obsess over sentences that no one else notices. Keep a journal. Because someday, this decade will end. But your words won’t.

And when someone reads them five, ten, or fifty years from now, they will feel it and say to themselves, “Whoever wrote this really lived.”