Tilly Oddy-Black on why life needs to suck in your twenties

“I remember thinking to myself, with a kind of dull disbelief, this might actually be it.”

Tilly Oddy-Black is a Sydney-based actor, comedian and content creator. This April, she’s taking to the stage at Melbourne International Comedy Festival with her debut show. You can find tickets here. 

As a ’96 baby, I grew up under a very specific kind of prophecy. It was given to most kids of that generation, delivered casually by parents and other adults, repeated with the confidence of something that was just universally true. It was either “Your twenties will be the best years of your life” or “It’s all downhill from there”. A promise or a threat, depending on how it was delivered.

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The sentiment was embedded in the culture itself. Well-furnished sitcom apartments with perfect friendships in shows like Friends promised that your twenties were devoted to having fun and dating, and your career just sort of happened in the background. The message was clear: get through high school and you’ll be rewarded with a golden decade of effortless joy.

And then, quite suddenly, you’re 25, in Brisbane, working behind the counter at a health food store. Supposedly at your ‘peak’, you can’t help but feel your life… sucks? Well, I did at least.

It wasn’t tragic or cinematic. It just didn’t live up to the prophecy that I’d been fed. I remember thinking to myself, with a kind of dull disbelief, this might actually be it. The golden era!

These days, there’s almost an entire genre devoted to softening this realisation so many are having. There are endless think pieces insisting your thirties are your new twenties, that everything – success, love, financial stability, a sense of self – is still coming, it’s just delayed. A comforting narrative but one that I don’t find particularly interesting. It seems to me just a shifting of the timeline. The more compelling question to me is: What if the disappointment is the point?

There’s a particular kind of resilience that forms in your twenties and it’s not the type that involves pushing yourself to the brink, working long hours and trying to have it all. It’s a slow recalibration that happens when life doesn’t exactly line up with your expectations and you learn to live (reluctantly at first) inside that gap.

Because the alternative is almost gross in its perfection. I often imagine being 20 again and having it all – perfect skin, a high salary, a great boyfriend, a cool career, the perfect friendship group with no drama, drifting or jealousy. It sounds idyllic in theory but I have a feeling I would’ve been insufferable, drunk on how good everything was.

There’s something deeply suspicious about ease at that age. A life too polished, too early. I look at people who work in my industry and have ‘made it’ at 19. Where does it go from there? Surely the trajectory can only tilt downwards. I’ve become convinced that if you peak too soon, everything afterwards feels like a decline, no matter how objectively good it is.

A slightly crappy twenties, on the other hand, offers something far more enduring. A kind of texture to your life. You learn how to go without, not in a romantic way but in the banal, everyday sense of things not going to plan. My key takeaway? You learn to be disappointed without collapsing.

Gratitude is impossible without some sort of contrast. How can you fully appreciate the luxury of something as simple as a good meal if you’ve never endured the colonoscopy prep diet?

And then there are the smaller, more personal evolutions. If you had handed me Accutane and laser hair removal at 20, I would never have developed a personality strong enough to distract you from my oily face and hairy arms.

Which is to say: the version of your life that doesn’t align with your fantasy may be doing the real work.

Find more from Tilly here.