When I was five, I was asked the most important question of my childhood: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I had an answer. A different one every week, but an answer nonetheless. Sometimes I wanted to be a doctor, sometimes a teacher, and once, very seriously, I wanted to be Elsa. I even researched how to get ice powers. Nobody questioned it. Nobody asked where I saw myself in five years.
I thought growing up meant eventually knowing. I would know what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, where I’d study, and even what kind of family I would have. I really thought adulthood came with a little envelope that said, “Congratulations. You are now grown up. Here is your personality, career, soulmate, friendship group, five-year plan, and preferred brand of coffee” with a little burst of confetti that popped when you opened it.
Unfortunately, mine seems to have been lost in the mail.
Nobody tells you that growing up doesn’t actually answer the questions, it just gives you better versions of them. “What do you want to be?” becomes “What are you doing after college?” “Who are your friends?” becomes “Are these the people you actually want around you?” “Do you like anyone?” becomes “So… are you dating anyone?” And eventually, somehow, “Are you happy?” becomes a question you need a moment to think about. Yet we are expected to move through all of these questions with certainty, as though there is a correct answer waiting somewhere and we simply haven’t found it yet.
And somewhere along the way, those questions stop feeling like questions and start feeling like expectations. We are expected to choose the right degree, find the right career, keep the right people close, fall in love with the right person, and somehow know what matters to us before we’ve had enough time to figure out who we are. We are encouraged to build a life that looks intentional from the outside and, once we have chosen a direction, to keep moving in it. Changing your mind can feel less like growing and more like admitting that you got it wrong.
But friendships change, relationships end, and new ones begin. People we thought would be in our lives forever slowly become people we remember fondly, or people we try very hard to forget. College rarely turns out exactly as we imagined it would. With every year comes a slightly different version of ourselves, carrying a new set of questions and quietly letting go of some of the old answers.
I look around and sometimes assume everyone else received the instructions but me. They seem to have the internship, the relationship, the friendship group, the five-year plan. Meanwhile, I am lying in bed at midnight wondering whether replying “haha” instead of “hahaha” just changed the course of a relationship.
Maybe that is because, when we were younger, we had a very different idea of what it meant to be grown up. Adults seemed to exist on the other side of some invisible finish line. They had jobs, houses, families, responsibilities. It took me a while to realise that the adults I once thought had all the answers were once twenty and confused too, and the person who seems completely certain about their life might have googled what they are doing around five minutes ago.
Perhaps growing up was never about becoming a finished version of ourselves. Perhaps it is about meeting new versions of ourselves along the way. We will discover things about ourselves that we couldn’t have known when we were younger, and occasionally make decisions our future selves will find both hilarious and deeply concerning. Some people stay, some leave, some make us happy, and others make us embarrassed enough to consider moving countries.
Maybe growing up is actually just realising that everyone is guessing, and getting a little better at pretending you know where you’re going.