MYTH: You’ll have a workout routine.
REALITY: You’ll wake up each morning from unsettling dreams and nothing will calm you until you check Twitter and confirm that the president has not launched a nuclear missile (yet).
MYTH: You’ll be confident in yourself.
REALITY: Every time you neglect to call your representative about each new humanitarian crisis is a new reason to hate yourself, even though you know in your heart that your elected officials do not care, and probably laugh at the weird combination of nervousness and anger your voice betrays when you leave them voicemails.
MYTH: You’ll understand where your money goes and how to stick to a budget.
REALITY: You will constantly be making calculations about whether or not you can afford to give any more money to the ACLU this month, or if Planned Parenthood needs the money more than the ACLU at this particular moment, or if you should just blow the rest of your savings on a comfortable pair of Birkenstocks you can wear to the apocalypse.
MYTH: You will know whether or not you want children.
REALITY: You will recognize that even considering that you may want children is a delusional refusal to recognize the world’s terrifying trajectory and proves that you would be an awful, irresponsible parent who is deeply unhinged from reality and unable to protect a child from danger, and that STILL won’t be enough to fully dissuade you from the possibility of having children.
MYTH: You will develop an appreciation for the finer things.
REALITY: For sure, yes. Drinking gin and tonics and drunk-tweeting long, incoherent political threads is totally a step up from tequila shots and drunk texting your exes.
MYTH: You will learn to “live and let live.”
REALITY: Each day something horrific doesn’t happen will feel like a spookily calm scene in a horror movie right before the protagonist’s entire family is murdered before their very eyes.
MYTH: You will enjoy watching morning TV news shows.
REALITY: The media sources that are reliable sources of news and information and the ones that are evil and designed to manipulate dumbasses will blend together, and you will not be able to tell the difference without consulting Snopes, which you’re also not sure if you can trust.
MYTH: You won’t get pimples anymore.
REALITY: You will still get pimples lolololol.
MYTH: You’ll strike a work-life balance that makes you happy.
REALITY: Begging the government to stop kidnapping children will be your unpaid part-time job, and you will be terrible at it.
MYTH: You will finally understand what kind of hairstyle and fashion choices work for your face shape and body type.
REALITY: You will come to understand that you would not martyr yourself to help unjustly-persecuted strangers the way you thought you might when you were younger, reading history books about violent times. You understand it because, while the world burns, here you are, reading online drivel about fashion as if the answer isn’t always just, “be rich.”