I was FaceTiming my younger sister, and she said something that made me feel sick. She was telling me about her senior year of high school and how excited she was for college, and then she said, “I just want to fast-forward to the part where I’m settled, like you.”
I truly laughed out loud.
I’m twenty-eight. Not settled. I have a job I’m ambivalent about, an apartment I keep meaning to repaint, and a relationship that’s been “going well for now” for a year and a half. From the outside, apparently, this looks like I’m settled. To me, it’s felt like the waiting room I’ve been sitting in since I was nineteen.
What hit me on the call was that my sister was about to do to her senior year exactly what I’d done to mine. What I’d done to every year since. I’ve spent most of my twenties trying to skip them, treating each year as practice for the year after, waiting for a version of my life that, I’m now starting to suspect, doesn’t arrive on a schedule. Doesn’t arrive on any schedule. Was not, in fact, ever planning to arrive.
I lived a year ahead of myself
Looking back, I haven’t been twenty-eight all year. I’ve been almost-twenty-nine.
It’s hard to explain, but I’ve done this with every year of my twenties. At twenty-two, I was already mentally in twenty-three. At twenty-four, I was already twenty-five. The current year was the one I was completing, the one that mostly mattered for what it would set me up for. The next year was the real one.
I planned in five-year increments. I made decisions based on where I thought I would be at thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five—without much regard for who I actually was on the Saturday afternoon of the decision.
The friends I have who lived their twenties this way, which is most of them, are now in their late twenties and saying the same things I am. The friends who somehow didn’t—and there are a few of them—talk about their twenties differently. They remember them. They have opinions about whether twenty-three was better than twenty-five.
I can tell you what year I bought my car. That’s mostly it.
I was waiting for a feeling that nobody actually gets
What I was waiting for, more than anything, was a feeling. The feeling of being a real adult. The feeling that my life was a life, and not a series of provisional arrangements I’d put together to get me through to the actual life.
Surely, I thought, the actual life would feel different. Surely there would be a moment of recognition. Surely I would, at some point, know.
What I’ve learned this year, mostly by asking my older sister, my mom, and a few coworkers in their forties whether they felt like real adults yet, is that the feeling is not coming. None of them feels it. My sister, who’s married with two kids and a mortgage, told me she still feels like she’s faking it. My mom said the feeling I’m waiting for hasn’t happened to her in sixty-three years
A piece on the gap between hitting the milestone and feeling what you thought you’d feel shows exactly what I’d been doing without realizing it—a kind of permanent forward-projection where the happiness is always one achievement away, and the achievement, when it comes, mostly just rearranges the furniture.
This was both devastating and a relief.
It was devastating because I’d been organizing my life around a milestone that doesn’t exist. It was a relief because if it doesn’t exist, then I haven’t been failing to reach it. The grown-up feeling is not waiting for me at thirty. It is not waiting for me at fifty. Nobody actually arrives. They just keep going.
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The milestones were always smaller than I imagined
It’s not only the feeling that doesn’t arrive. The milestones don’t arrive the way I thought they would, either.
The job I’d been wanting for two years happened. I got it. The first day, I sat in my new desk chair and felt the way I’d felt at the old desk, the day before. Smaller, even. I’d been waiting for it to feel like something. It felt like a desk.
The vacation I’d been saving for for a year happened. The first day was good. On the fourth day, I was already thinking about coming home. The trip, which I’d imagined as a kind of release, was instead a normal vacation, which is a different thing.
The apartment I moved into was nice. It looked good. I spent the first month buying the right rugs and the right candles. By month three, the apartment was just where I lived. The rugs were just rugs.
Nothing I’d been waiting for arrived the way I’d been told to expect. Every milestone showed up smaller than I’d imagined it. Every arrival felt less like arriving and more like another day.
I rushed through everything I’m now nostalgic for
There’s a specific quality to the nostalgia I have for my early twenties that I’m finding embarrassing.
I’m nostalgic for the apartment I shared with two roommates in a city I was trying to move out of. I’m nostalgic for the job I complained about constantly because the pay was bad and the hours were long. I’m nostalgic for the relationship I broke up with at twenty-four, who I now remember as someone who was actually quite kind to me, and who I was, at the time, planning to grow out of.
The strange thing about all of this is that I was, in real time, the one trying to escape. I was the one who complained about the apartment. I was the one who took on extra hours because I was trying to leave that job. I was the one who broke up with the kind person because he didn’t fit the version of my future I was constructing.
Research on the developmental texture of the twenties describes this decade as a particular kind of in-between—an extended stretch of identity exploration that’s supposed to feel unsettled, that’s supposed to be lived rather than survived, and that gets thinned out badly when you spend the whole thing leaning into the year after.
It turns out the things I was rushing past were the things that were going to make up my life. They were not the warm-up. They were the actual thing.
The years shaped me, whether I showed up or not
Whatever I thought I was doing, the years were happening to me anyway.
I am the person I am now because of the apartment I rushed to leave, the job I undervalued, and the relationship I underestimated.
I am the person I am because of the friend I almost lost at twenty-five over something that felt huge at the time and stupid now.
Because of the version of me at twenty-three who decided to take herself to the doctor for the first time without her mother. Because of the bad haircut I got at twenty-six that I cried about for three days.
None of this was the plan. None of it would have made the list, if I’d been making a list of things to do in my twenties. All of it shaped me anyway, while I was busy planning the next thing.
The decade did not wait for my permission to form me. It used what was happening. It used what I was barely paying attention to. It used the in-between moments I thought didn’t count.
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I’m finally trying to be in the here and now
I’m twenty-eight. I have, by my math, sixteen more months of this decade before it becomes the previous one.
What I’m trying to do now, every day, is be in it. Not in the year after it. Not in the version of my life that I keep thinking is about to start. The year I’m in. The Tuesday afternoon I’m in. The job I’m in, for now. The apartment with the rugs I’ve stopped caring about decorating.
It’s awkward. I don’t know how to do it. I catch myself, constantly, leaning into next week or next year or what I’ll be doing at thirty-two. The leaning is the habit of a decade. It’s going to take a while to unlearn.
But I’ve caught myself a few times in the last six months, fully present. On a walk. At a friend’s kitchen table. Reading a book my boyfriend lent me. And what’s different about those moments isn’t that something special is happening. What’s different is that I’m here for what’s happening, instead of waiting for it to be over.
I’m twenty-eight. I am here. I’m trying to make this one count for what it is, instead of what it might lead to.
It might be the first year of my twenties that I actually live.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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