Twenty.

Twenty is a strange age. It's an age where you're no longer a teenager, and not quite yet an adult. There isn't a word for that, but I guess turning twenty means I can officially consider myself a "twenty-something" and be the subject of the unsolicited advice that lifestyle magazines just love to throw at us.

And according to such magazines and websites, all of us twenty-somethings are lost. We're trying to find our way in life, and doing it all so much slower than the generation before us. We need life-hacks, 5-year-plans, and tips on how to "survive."

But why are we an age-group that is portrayed as so bumbling, confused, and inexperienced? Why can't we be trusted to navigate the big, scary "adult" world on our own, without being dismissed as not knowing anything?

I feel like I'm supposed to feel scared terrified as I now enter my twenties. The real world is coming, and maybe I'm not ready.

But I think what these (usually well-intentioned) advice pieces fail to realize is that the scary thing about your twenties is not that we don't have any life skills (spoiler alert: we do), but that we're not given any time to transition between these stages of life. We're either too dumb to know how to hack life, or we are perfectly capable full-grown adults.  

But the truth is, us twenty-somethings have everything going for us- except, maybe, an astronomic amount of student debt that our parents generation didn't have to deal with.

There isn't anything wrong with admitting that you need help in life, but we also need to stop categorizing ourselves as a generation that needs help in every facet of life. I mean, come on, we can all learn to cook and stop relying on Seamless for every meal. We can do the laundry once a week without even considering buying new underwear to put it off for a few more days. We can interview for a job and nail it because we prepared well and put on a killer (yet appropriate) outfit.

Today, I'm twenty. And I have ten more years of putting up with the likes of Cosmo and Buzzfeed trying to tell me that I'm struggling at life and need their help to do basic tasks. I have a lot of learning to do (and I mean a lot), but I know that I can handle life, bar a few missteps along the way.

So I'm not afraid to be a twenty-something. In fact, I'm excited to be the kind of twenty-something who's killing it at life.

At least, most of the time.