20...what an odd number.

I turned twenty today. Twenty years old. If I am lucky then around 25% of my life is now over, and for what? Have I really accomplished anything of value? What awaits during my next twenty years? All of these questions are on my mind as I sit here writing this. I wish that I had some deep message within this post, as I would have liked to accumulate some wisdom within the last twenty years, yet I am left with nothing. Mere emptiness is all I find as I search for something over the last two decades of my life. However, as I think more and more there is no meaning to life besides what we give to it. I have existed and lived off and on during my life, but now I am choosing to live full time from now on. The meaning in my life with be what I determine it to be, not what the world or anyone in it should try to impose on it, positive or otherwise. My "mind forg'd manacles" that I have so long been enslaved to I am now choosing to cast off to allow myself to live life to its fullest. I am choosing my newfound freedom over the opression I have so long let myself live under.
Now some quotes that I am considering today:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
-Henry Longfellow

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman

Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.
-Walt Whitman

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
-Walt Whitman