How To Be 25 (By Someone Who Just Turned 25)

I think I’m supposed to be in the thick of my quarter-life crisis, but life expectancy for women in the US is 81.2 years. Meaning, my quarter-life crisis should have been happening since the December after I turned 20. So, I guess I’m behind. Should I have been divvying up the belongings of my former self already? I’ve got a half-pound of ground turkey in the fridge that’s going to go bad soon if anyone wants that. I also haven’t written a will. So, in case of emergency, please follow the instructions on my Twitter.

I titled this piece before I started writing it, which now seems like a mistake. A mistake I could very easily fix with quite literally the press of a button. A mistake no one would even know about were I not to mention it at all. But here we are: me, loudly announcing the mistakes I am in the process of making, and you, about to click away to watch a BuzzFeed video of people eating dog food for the first time. Bye! Have fun! Dying to find out if the chicken-flavored stuff doesn’t smell or taste like chicken at all, so let me know!!!

I don’t know how to be 25. Even ironically, as I intended the title to be. This is as far as I got when trying to devise a tutorial on being 25:

• Step 1: Be Born
• Step 2: Don’t Die
• Step 3: Profit???

Then, I tried writing a list of “25 Things To Know Before You Turn 25” because that seemed easy and approachable and click-worthy and we all like lists that tell us exactly how many things we’re going to have to read before we can get back watching videos of people eating dog food.

But I only got this far:

1. You will probably grow nipple hairs.
   It’s a thing. People don’t talk about it enough. “Enough” meaning constantly. I am forever shouting about the tiny hairs growing around my boobs just in case there is some unsuspecting female in earshot who doesn’t know and needs to be educated on both her forthcoming nipple hairs and my existing ones.
2. It’s not a big deal.
   This directly refers to the nipple hair thing, but also a little bit to everything else. Most things aren’t big deals. This isn’t breaking news. There are probably four dozen different Thought Catalog listicles on it with accompanying stock photography of sunrises and disembodied thumbs-up.
   But this is one of those things you hear people say constantly and never really process until something significant happens in your life, and you’re like, “OH, OKAY. I GET IT NOW. THANK YOU, THOUGHT CATALOG. THAT SEPIA-TONED SUNRISE WAS A NICE VISUAL METAPHOR. ALSO, FOR FUTURE REFERENCE, ADDING A SEPIA FILTER OVER A SUNRISE SEEMS LIKE A MISUSE OF THE MEDIUM AS A SUNRISE IS IN FACT KNOWN FOR ITS BEAUTIFUL COLOR GRADIENT. BUT YOU STILL GOT THE POINT ACROSS, I GUESS.”
3. There is no end goal.
   Everything is just a series of things. Is this deep? Can I put this on a t-shirt and call it merch? Are you there, Tumblr? It’s me, Mia.

Turns out 25 things is a lot of things. Is 25 years a lot of years? Is that were I was going with all of this?

(Dear Future Mia – please edit all of this and punch it up and maybe don’t even post it and why are we not eating all the cake and ice creams write now? Oh my god, I just unintentionally wrote the incorrect “write,” and I’m leaving it for comedy and also leaving this note to detract from the aforementioned comedy, and now nothing matters and I still don’t have cake.)

Okay. This is perhaps the laziest thing I’ve written in a while. Because it’s my birthday, can everybody just do me a solid and have a great day? Go do a thing that makes you happy. Look at a bunch of puppies, in real life or photo form. Eat cake in my honor. Or go watch that goddamn dog food video.