Well let’s see, I left my magic wand in my 20’s, you know the one…The one where it produces mass quantities of idyllic world changing theories*. Let’s see what else?
I left my perfect abs in my 20’s…
My singleness.
Drinking Booze.
My lower mortgage.
I still have some earth changing theories, they are just more practical. 
I left my:
weed smoking
casual sex
size 30 waist
relative poverty
immaturity
financial ambivalence
drunk driving
irresponsibility
singleness
back in my 20’s.
I’ve just entered my 20s, and it sounds like I’m in for a hell of a time.
I’m 24 right now, and it looks as if I’m not having enough fun so far.
I don’t drink beer anymore. Two and I need a nap.
My ability to make RL friends.
I left my
experimenting with hard drugs
naivete
flat stomach
childlessness
military service
thrill seeking behavior
binge drinking
involvement with police
more bad ass attitude
back in my 20s.
Geez, looking at that list I feel lucky to have survived.
Gymnastics abilities (learning that lesson sucked)
Being debt-free (I’m OK now, but for a while there…)
Impulsiveness (You really should think first, sometimes.)
Devil-may-care attitude (Aw, shit, you mean there are consequences?)
A large part of my optimism (But I still have some left.)
I’m still in my 20s, but I don’t like the fact that I’ll never see a good old fashioned Spring Break.
I wonder if a guy working on a Phd can still be King of Cancun?
Promiscuity (actually, I left it in my early 40s).
The real question being…would a guy working on his Phd WANT to be king of Cancun?
With my personal experience with this very same thing, I opted for the fun ride, and not the easy way out. Then again I hit every branch/root on the way down the rabbit hole. When i got to the bottom, I looked back and see the folly of my ways. But that is where my bliss begins, knowing I never have to make those mistakes again.
blacking out
being able to run more than twice a week
Oh, god, you too? For me, it’s a classic case of, “It’s not them, it’s me.” I just don’t TRUST anyone anymore; I’ve had too many “perfect circles of friends” just blow up in drama. Used to be I could fall in love in an evening, and have 23 bestest friends forever by the end of a weekend. Now I just see huge stacks of baggage every time I meet someone and I’m afraid to get close lest I be conked in the head by a stray carry-on.
Also, my figure. I lost most of that at 17, when I got pregnant, but I have to say, looking at old pictures, that I didn’t look nearly as bad in my 20’s as I thought I did at the time.
With age comes baggage. The nice part about being in your 50s is that the baggage that was dragged around in our 30s and 40s has been inconspicuously stashed behind that ficus tree in our brains. It’s not gone, but we find that we’ve lost the combination to the lock. It just doesn’t matter as much anymore.
You’ve got a ficus? I’ve got an old stump covered in poison ivy.
:mad:
Tell me about it.
I also lost my pompadour (to heredity), my ambition (to the rat race), and my dreams.
Bummer. I was hiding it all behind a weeping willow for a while, but that got old. I’ve graduated to ficus (delicate, but usually has a comeback). With any luck, in my 60s it’ll be a giant sequoia with good, deep roots and a long life.
You have no idea what a relief it is to read that. Seriously.
I’m still IN my 20’s and I have this problem. My only true real life friends aside from my husband live half a country away from me, and there aren’t that many of them.
I don’t drink anything but wine and, perhaps once a year or so, a wine cooler. No hard liquor, no mixed drinks, no beer (although I’ve always hated beer). The years of 18-20 were when I got all of that out of my system. Then I started to realize that being drunk for the sake of being drunk wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and it turns out that I really don’t like the taste of alcohol.
On my 21st birthday, I tried a Long Island Iced Tea for the first time, absolutely hated it, and I was pretty well done from then on (this was almost 11 years ago).