The Age of Almost

On being twenty-four, the lives we imagined, and the strange business of becoming.

At twenty-four, I am beginning to suspect that adulthood is simply a long series of moments in which you realize nobody really knows what they’re doing.

When I was eighteen, I had a rather generous understanding of how the next six years would unfold. By twenty-four, I imagined I would be married, settled down, and comfortably established in a successful career. I pictured a woman who knew what she wanted, where she was going, and, perhaps most importantly, how she intended to get there.

I assumed adulthood would arrive with some sort of certainty. That one day I would wake up and find myself transformed into the kind of woman who understood mortgages, remembered to schedule appointments, and never had to wonder whether she was making the right decisions. Instead, I’m twenty-four, and I still feel like I’m waiting for someone to explain what happens next.

It’s a strange age, twenty-four. Old enough to be considered an adult in every legal and practical sense, yet young enough to remember being a child with uncomfortable clarity. Sometimes I think about how, for most of my life, I wasn’t even particularly aware of the passage of time. I was simply growing up, moving from one birthday to the next without considering what any of them meant.

And now, suddenly, I’m keeping track.

Twenty came and went. Then twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Four years of my twenties have disappeared faster than I ever imagined they could, and I find myself increasingly aware that time is passing whether I’m doing anything remarkable with it or not. I worry about wasting these years more often than I’d like to admit.

There’s an unspoken expectation that your twenties are supposed to be extraordinary. You’re meant to travel, fall in love, make mistakes, discover yourself, build a career, and collect enough experiences to spend the rest of your life reminiscing about them. Somehow, you’re also supposed to save money, make responsible decisions, and establish the foundations of a stable future. I haven’t quite figured out how anyone manages to do all of that simultaneously.

I want to see Paris. I want to wander unfamiliar streets, sit in cafés where nobody knows my name, and experience the peculiar freedom of being somewhere I’ve never been before. I want to look back on my twenties and remember that I did things worth remembering.

Sometimes, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I find myself imagining an entirely different life. One where I’m the face of a makeup campaign or a clothing collection, photographed in beautiful places, wearing beautiful things, and somehow making a living out of the sort of romanticized existence I’ve spent years admiring from afar. In these little daydreams, everything seems effortlessly put together. There are photographs worth keeping, places worth visiting, and a version of myself who seems to move through the world with the kind of confidence I’ve always imagined adulthood would bring.

And then I look around.

I’m in bed, halfway through a book, occasionally scrolling through my phone, with absolutely nothing remarkable happening around me. It’s almost comical, the distance between the lives I imagine and the one I’m actually living. In my head, I’m somewhere in Paris, dressed beautifully and doing something impossibly interesting. In reality, I’m wondering whether I should get up and do laundry.

I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with an ordinary life. In fact, I think there’s something rather lovely about having a quiet afternoon with nowhere to be. But sometimes I worry that I’m becoming too comfortable imagining the life I want instead of actually living it. Perhaps that’s what frightens me most about getting older. Not that my life is ordinary, but that one day I’ll look back and realize I spent so much time dreaming about extraordinary things that I forgot I was allowed to pursue them.

I wonder how many other people my age feel the same way. From the outside, everyone seems to be arriving somewhere. People I went to school with are buying houses, getting married, building careers, and settling into lives that appear remarkably complete. I watch these milestones unfold and feel a strange mixture of happiness for them and disappointment in myself.

It’s difficult not to compare your unfinished life to someone else’s finished-looking one. And yet, I know appearances rarely tell the whole story. There are people my age who still seem to be living in the carefree years I sometimes miss, while I’ve experienced things that made me feel older long before I was ready. I find myself caught between feeling impossibly behind and strangely ahead, depending on which part of adulthood we’re measuring.

I sometimes wonder how I can feel so far behind in life when so much of it has already happened to me.

Losing my mother changed my understanding of age in ways I still struggle to explain.

There are experiences that make the distance between you and your peers feel much greater than a number ever could. At twenty-four, I know what it means to lose someone whose presence you assumed would accompany you into every version of your future. I know what it’s like to continue growing older while someone you love remains forever in the past. Not everyone my age understands that yet. While I would never wish that understanding on anyone, it has changed the way I move through the world.

Before my mother died, I imagined success in relatively conventional terms. I wanted to write. I wanted to travel the world. I imagined a career that would take me somewhere far beyond the small town where I’d grown up. There are days when I still mourn that future.

Actually, I think I mourn several futures.

I’ve wanted to be so many different things that sometimes it feels as though I’ve lived entire lives in my imagination. There was the woman who would build a career in writing, the woman who would travel endlessly, the woman who would leave her hometown and establish herself somewhere entirely new. I can picture each of them so clearly. Sometimes I wonder what their lives would have looked like if I’d become them. Instead, I’ve found myself back in the place I once imagined leaving behind.

There’s something difficult about returning to your hometown when you believed you were meant to go somewhere else. Familiar streets can feel comforting and disappointing in equal measure. You recognize everything around you, but you don’t always recognize the person you’ve become since you left. Sometimes being home feels like starting over. Other times, it feels like starting over again.

But somewhere along the way, my understanding of success began to change. I discovered that helping people gave me a kind of satisfaction I hadn’t anticipated. That there was meaning in being useful to someone, in making a difficult day a little easier, in doing something that mattered even if nobody outside that moment ever knew about it.

I still love writing. I still want to travel. I still dream about Paris.

But I’ve begun to understand that a meaningful life might look different from the impressive one I imagined at eighteen. Perhaps that’s what growing older really is. Not necessarily abandoning your dreams, but learning which ones still belong to you and which ones belonged to someone you used to be.

Even so, I wish I felt more certain.

The strangest part of adulthood might be how inconsistently other people seem to recognize it in you. When I visit family, I can feel the expectations changing. At twenty-four, I’m supposed to know things, understand things, and behave with a maturity that apparently wasn’t required of me even a year ago. Then I go to work, where I sometimes feel as though I’m still being treated like I’m twenty. I’m old enough to be expected to know better, but young enough to be reminded that I don’t know everything. I suppose both things are true.

The closer I get to thirty, the more aware I become of all the imaginary deadlines I’ve created for myself. Thirty has always existed somewhere in the distance, an age that belonged to real adults with established lives and matching furniture.

Now it feels uncomfortably close.

I know, logically, that turning thirty won’t mean I’ve run out of time. People begin careers, fall in love, move across the world, and reinvent themselves at every age. I know there isn’t a universal schedule we’re all expected to follow. But knowing something and believing it are two very different things.

There’s still a part of me that looks at the years ahead and wonders whether I’ll have accomplished enough by the time I get there. Enough for whom, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe that’s the trouble with being twenty-four. You’re old enough to understand that life doesn’t always unfold according to plan, but young enough to keep believing there must be some plan you’re supposed to be following.

You’re almost established. Almost certain. Almost where you thought you’d be. Always almost something.

And yet, for all my complaints about being twenty-four, there are things I genuinely love about it.

For one, I think I’m beautiful. Which, considering how much time I spend worrying about the future, feels like a small but important victory. My skin has never looked better, and if the universe insists on making me question every major decision I’ve ever made, the least it can do is let me enjoy my reflection.

I like that I’m beginning to know myself in ways I couldn’t have at eighteen. I like that I’ve learned to change my mind, even when doing so means admitting that something I once wanted no longer fits the person I’m becoming. I like that I still have dreams. Even the impractical ones, especially the impractical ones. And perhaps that’s what I need to remember when I catch myself worrying that I’m running out of time.

At eighteen, I thought twenty-four would be an arrival. A destination. The age at which I would finally become the woman I’d spent my adolescence imagining. But I’m beginning to wonder whether there is any such destination.

Maybe adulthood isn’t a moment of sudden certainty. Maybe it’s a collection of ordinary Tuesdays, difficult decisions, unexpected beginnings, and the occasional realization that you’ve become someone your younger self wouldn’t quite recognize.

I don’t know where I’ll be at thirty. I don’t know whether I’ll have the career, the home, or the life I imagine for myself now. I don’t know when I’ll finally make it to Paris, or how many more times I’ll change my mind before I get there.

For once, I’d like to believe that not knowing doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong. Because I am twenty-four. I am not the woman I imagined becoming at eighteen, and I’m not yet the woman I’ll be at thirty. I’m somewhere in between, trying to build a life while simultaneously learning how to live it.

And perhaps, for now, being almost is enough.