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A Letter to All The 20-Something Women

By: Reiley Zeitler

Womanhood is a constant flow of new experiences and everlasting questions. It’s about borrowing each other’s clothes and forgetting to ever give them back. It’s about going shopping, but not actually buying anything. Or ordering enough takeout that could feed a small village and only taking six bites of it. Womanhood is about getting your heart broken for the first time. Crying on the shower floor and telling your mom you can’t go to school. Being a woman in your twenties are borrowing a hair tie from the girl you met thirty seconds ago in front of the bathroom stalls.

Womanhood is plucking your eyebrows in your mother’s mirror, your skin shining red. Or the first time you cut your legs shaving. Womanhood is getting genuinely excited when you realize your dress or skirt has pockets, and feeling happy when your best friend finally breaks up with her shitty boyfriend. Or it’s when you wear the most hideous outfit to go to the gas station at midnight to get a little sweet
treat. Being a woman is having people tell you that you aren’t sitting like a lady, that you aren’t being lady like. But the boys are sitting in the conference room with their ties undone and their legs spread wide open. And it’s the night of your first date, and you’re
getting ready, and you have your whole wardrobe on the floor. Being a woman is thinking that you’re so young, but you’re also so old. Or thinking, “I can do what I want, but I need to be careful.”

Being a woman in your twenties is thinking you are an adult, but that you need help from an adult. It’s thinking that you’ve done a lot, but that you’ve also done nothing. Womanhood is falling in love; Constantly falling in love. And it’s about getting your heart broken. Constantly getting your heart broken. It’s about braiding your sister’s hair and wearing matching pajamas on Christmas Eve. It’s wiping mascara out from under your eyes as you leave the and go back to class. Womanhood is crying on your birthday, and feeling guilty for it after.

Womanhood is the joy in discovering the beauty of female friendships. And how you realize these types of friendships don’t come around often. Being a woman is your favorite pair of shoes being the ones that hurt the most to wear, and a whole conversation exchanged in a single look. Being a woman is getting told you look like your mother while thinking you don’t, but you’re staring back at her in the mirror. Womanhood in your twenties is the insecurities you gain while looking at the fakeness portrayed from influencers across social media. Or lying awake late at night in your bed wondering where the sweater you haven’t seen in eight months is. It’s sleeping on the bathroom floor because you’re too drunk and lazy to keep walking back and forth from your bedroom and the bathroom. Womanhood is about learning yourself, and loving yourself. It’s about messing up. Again, and again, and again.

Reiley Zeitler