Does anyone know what they’re doing?

I wrote this pitch for an online magazine a handful of years ago and the editor invited me to make a submission. I never wrote it and looking back, I’m glad.

It went like this:

Twentysomethings, also known as: individuals with not enough life experience to know what we’re doing, but also have too many miles on our stories to act like we don’t. 

On the topic of growth, I would love to explore the vulnerable and pressure-filled period of our early to mid-twenties. I am a twentysomething myself and while I don’t have all the answers, I’m finding that many of us don’t want them anyway. Rather, we only want to know that we’re not the only ones feeling a little clueless, a little nervous, and a little overwhelmed. 

I read this now and part of me agrees with some of it, but most of me scoffs because I’ve spent my twenties wanting these answers that I claimed in this pitch “none of us want.”

Additionally, the naïveté of “we only want to know that we’re not the only ones” makes me cringe. Maybe there’s some sentimental comfort in that, but If I’m on a sinking ship with the strangers of my generation, I don’t look around and warmly smile at the fact that at least I’m amongst friends of a similar fate. I’m looking for the captain, the person who looks like they paid attention during the safety video, the person with life jackets.  

I’m looking for answers in panic.

In the same breath, the first part of this pitch still resonates. Now, more than ever—and I fear will only intensify as the years continue—I believe I should know what I’m doing. The further I get into my twenties, the less of an excuse I feel I have for not knowing.  

Months ago, I questioned why knowing what I wanted when I was younger seemed to be such an easier process than today. I felt pulled towards this school, this program, this job—pulled toward new chapters and so ready to make changes, confident in my ability.

At 19 I left home for 6 months and traveled.

At 21 I started a job I had little qualifications for.

At 23 I drove across the country.

At 24 I moved to a new city and tried getting my foot in new doors.

25?

26?

27?

The growth has been harder to see in these mid to late twenties and momentum has wildly slowed.

At some point, and it feels like it happened overnight, it goes from a hopeful “I’m only this age” to a sobering “I’m already this age.”

With my potential still unmet, it seems like ground zero is where I’ve set up camp and the next path is roped off.

Reflecting with a friend at her birthday a few weeks ago, we shared how we both envisioned how certain things would at least be somewhat established by now— we’d have a career path not a day job, we might be dating someone seriously not agonizing over redownloading that app we gave half a chance, or married with a kid in the works. Milestones. Building blocks of life.

The place this gets the most disheartening is holding this up to the lives of friends that seem to be passing those mile markers with ease: building their businesses, getting engaged, preparing for that trip of a lifetime.  

In the back of my mind, I know it’s not all rainbows and good hair days for these people, but at least they aren’t still waiting in the same lines as me.  

The opening lines to a lot of journal entries during this decade have sounded something like:

I’m spiraling

I might implode

I am gradually becoming more unraveled

I’m confused

Why is time moving so quickly?

I need to get braver

I feel stuck

Where are we going?

Many of these journal entries resulting in me sitting with the same question as before:

When are my lost years going to be over?

Shouldn’t feeling lost be temporary? At what exhausting point does the experience of floating cause for deeper concern? Is this self-sabotage? Is this par for the course in life? Does anyone know what they’re doing and if they say yes, are they lying?

Maybe this is part of the human experience and anyone who says they’ve felt confident at every stage of life is deceiving both themselves and everyone else.

The tough thing is while living your lost years, you still have to exist. You still have bills to pay and relationships to maintain and teeth to brush. The clock doesn’t stop ticking, your body doesn’t stop aging, the world will keep picking up speed. Nothing around you will wait until you figure it all out.

How do we have so much time and no time at all?  

I have no answers, but I’m reminded of this quote and, if nothing else, it offers me some peace:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rilke