For reasons not yet fully understood, stepping into your early twenties seems to trigger a kind of panic that never existed before, at least not on this scale.
In my final, albeit dramatic, farewell to my teen years just a week ago, I found myself overwhelmed. The pressure of everything ahead settled in all at once: the life I was expected to build, the decisions I would eventually have to make, and the quiet understanding that there was no longer a clear roadmap.
For many of us, this pressure comes from several directions. Social media plays a major role. Our feeds are saturated with carefully curated success stories: peers landing dream jobs, travelling the world, falling in love, or appearing emotionally and financially secure. These snapshots create the illusion that everyone else has a clear path and a perfectly timed plan.
The biggest challenge, however, is the fear of the unknown. For the first time, you are fully in control and carrying the weight of your own life. Finances, careers, five-year plans, relationships. Suddenly, every decision feels permanent and defining. There are no clear rules or universal timelines, although culture and society may make you feel otherwise. Because everyone is on a different path, no one can really tell you where to go or what to do. The freedom that once felt exciting now feels heavy, because there is no guarantee you are making the “right” choice.
Compounding this fear is the constant sense that time is running out. Social media and cultural expectations quietly suggest that by now you should be established, certain, and steadily moving forward. There’s an unspoken pressure to have already figured out who you are and who you’re becoming, to lay down certain foundations for your life because there is no time like youth, as if self-discovery comes with a deadline. When your life does not match those imagined timelines, it’s easy to feel behind, even when you are simply still becoming.
Diving deeper into the cultural implications, young women are navigating a strange duality. They are encouraged to reject traditional ideas of womanhood while still being quietly judged by them. On one hand, women are told not to follow outdated paths. Marriage is no longer meant to be the ultimate goal. Success is framed as independence, maintaining friendships, a booming social life, and a lifestyle that visibly signals adulthood. The pressure to embody the picture-perfect “it girl” life only adds to the weight already being carried.
On the other hand, those traditional expectations never fully disappear. The question of a significant other still lingers, even when it goes unspoken. Being single is acceptable, but only temporarily. Romantic stability continues to function as a marker of emotional maturity and personal success. Likewise, “doing well for yourself” rarely refers solely to personal fulfilment. It often implies stability, respectability, and steady progress along a familiar, linear path. When so much is already being demanded, how is anyone meant to keep all of this up? And what does it mean when your life doesn’t look like this at all?
Your twenties are supposed to be tricky: full of chaos, but mostly fun. They are meant to be a time of discovery, experimentation, and trying on different versions of yourself. This is the decade where you are allowed to mess around and find out, to follow multiple plots, false starts, and parallel storylines, all of which eventually weave together into something that feels like your own. There is no single narrative you are supposed to follow, only the one that slowly takes shape as you live it.
The biggest mistake you can make in your early twenties is believing you have no time. In reality, you have more time than you realise. Time to change your mind. Time to get it wrong. Time to grow into yourself without having everything figured out at once. Take your time. You are not behind, you are just beginning.