Pythagoras hasn’t been of any use so far. Neither did the deadly boredom from reading Le Clezio’s “The Desert”. Life as an adult wasn’t exactly what the teachers promised. No, I didn’t need to “understand when I grow up.” What I needed was to be taught when I asked, because now that I am grown up, I have no one to ask. What I mean is that I wish I had been taught useful daily skills instead of the entirety of the names, birth dates, and societal hierarchy of The House of Bourbon. Upon reading this, you might agree with me and argue that our educational system—public, private, or whatever it may be—should have taught us to become great entrepreneurs, to manage our emotions, and to master the power of our minds. However, I’m referring to those ‘common-sense’ skills. Ones learned best through their opposites.
Navigating life in your 20s is learning that wool sweaters shouldn't be washed with the rest of your laundry; to be precise, a special program has been specifically designed for all wool items. It’s also finding out that shaving your hair the wrong way will make it reincarnate into an awfully painful, ingrown hair pimple. It’s realizing that you should never drive on the fuel reserve: 150 kilometers is actually less than you think. It’s discovering that your knives should often be sharpened, that scrolling on TikTok for a few hours in the dark will not get you anywhere, and that going to the movies costs 16.49€, not 12.99€.
Isn’t that how all basic things are learned, you will ask? Well, in part, yes. It’s like “fire burns”—I wouldn’t be certain until I touch it.
As a little girl, I thought that things would be naturally known and understood: “You’ll understand when you grow up.” But I didn’t beat the universal law of learning. Mistakes will be made until the lessons are learned. However, some lessons are slower, murkier, stretched across months or years before they fully sink in. Like witnessing that friendships don’t last just because you want them to. That a text left on read for three days is, in reality, a response. That some people won’t change, no matter how much you communicate, wait, or hope.
Navigating life in your 20s also means discovering that no one actually knows what they’re doing. That feeling lost isn’t a phase but more like a background noise, occasionally fading, occasionally deafening. That your parents and the adults you grew up around—the ones who seemed so put together when you were younger—were just improvising the whole time. It’s assimilating that “fake it until you make it” is not just a trendy quote—confidence isn’t about having the answers but about acting like you do. That your body keeps the score, whether it’s from four hours of sleep, stress disguised as a stomach ache, or the fourth coffee you convinced yourself you needed. That burnout accumulates quietly, in late-night overthinking and early-morning exhaustion, in the slow erosion of excitement for things that used to make you feel alive. It’s experiencing that loneliness doesn’t always look like solitude. Sometimes, it looks like standing in a crowded room and realizing there’s no one you’d call if something went wrong, or sitting across from someone you used to know by heart and feeling like strangers. It’s understanding that people disappear, not necessarily because they meant to, but because life pulls everyone in different directions, and not everyone fights the current to stay.
Yet, in the unravelling of this uncertainty, you also start becoming aware that freedom isn’t just about making your own choices, but about understanding that you have choices. Yes, the weight of responsibility is heavier than you expected, but so is the lightness of possibility. Reinvention is possible. In fact, reinvention is inevitable. A morning arrives when a city could be left behind, hair could be cut, a career path once permanent could be abandoned […].
This occurs not from sudden rebellion, but from the slow fading of the self-imposed rules that once held it together.
The self, now free, can move away from its former structure.
A boomer here, 60+. I so envy that you came to all these beautiful realizations as early as you have. This essay taught me things, and I've lived three of your lives. Still, better late than never. I'm not throwing self shade. I'm grateful that you articulated your eye-openers as effectively as you did here. I love your optimistic turn in the closing paragraphs. You've lightened and brightened my day!
so glad i read this today ♡