26 & Counting: Grazia's Zoe Beaty [Instagram]
Zoe Beaty is 26 and counting. Counting the days until payday (four) and the charges on her overdraft (£40). She's in her mid-twenties and in the midst of a phase where you're not sure if it's ok to eat chicken nuggets in bed at 2am on a Tuesday or if you should really be getting your shit together. This is her weekly column for everyone else who is also 20something and counting…
…Or rather, am I good enough, is the question I find myself asking most often. Am I funny enough? Am I intelligent enough? Am I (eugh) thin enough?
Do I have enough friends? Do I have enough Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Instagram posts? Should I be writing more, working harder, travelling more, sleeping less? Should I see my family more, cook more, know more, read more, be more to other people, be more feminist? Am I good enough at sex and am I doing it right and am I having enough of it? Have I had enough wine (no), are there enough chicken nuggets in the house? (Never.) Have I repeated the word ‘enough’ to many times already in this column? (Yes and sorry about that.)
Some things will never change: you will never learn enough, you can never read enough and you will never have enough hair ties. And of course it’s important to be ambitious and propel ourselves forward to better things. But it seems at the moment we’re all so preoccupied questioning everything we do and simultaneously conducting the never-ending search for bobbles that we’re forgetting to be happy enough.
Since I started posting more on Facebook I feel definitively awkward if I get less than 40 likes. Friends tell me that they quietly delete Instagram posts and tweets if they don’t collate a few responses out of embarrassment. There’s pressure from the media, from our peers and predecessors to be better than we are.
Especially for millennials in their twenties it’s been well documented that it’s become second nature for us to unashamedly compare every part of our lives to each other. What we’re really doing is self-flagellating, seeking out something better than the way we perceive ourselves to be: currently I feel like crap because I know several 26-year-olds with book deals and because I know more are kicking ass on the comedy circuits. Because Lena Dunham. because others just seem to give less f*cks than me.
We should all be giving less f*cks. Because it’s exhausting second-guessing yourself and counting likes and retweets and never feeling like what you’re doing, what you look like, what you say or what you do is adequate. It is.