At 27, I thought I would feel more settled inside my own life. Instead, while friends make plans for mortgages, marriages, and babies, I quietly wonder whether feeling lost in your 20s is something everyone else has simply learnt to hide.
I stayed in my car for eleven minutes after work on a Tuesday evening.
I know it was eleven because the dashboard clock said 18:14 when I parked outside my flat and 18:25 when I finally took the key out of the ignition.
Nothing had happened.
That was almost the problem.
My phone was glowing in the cup holder beside me. One friend had sent a photograph of the keys to the house she had just bought with her boyfriend. Another had announced in our university WhatsApp group that she was pregnant.
Seventeen heart emojis sat beneath the message.
I had contributed two of them.
Then I put my phone face down and stared through the windscreen at the recycling bins.
Upstairs, there was half a lasagne in the fridge, laundry draped over the radiator and a basil plant I had somehow managed to kill despite it requiring almost no emotional commitment from me.
My life was fine.
That sentence had become both comfort and accusation.
I had a job. I paid my rent. I had friends who remembered my birthday. My parents were healthy. I could afford the occasional weekend away and the expensive shampoo I once took as proof that somebody had become a proper adult.
And yet, lately, I had been feeling lost in my 20s in a way I could not quite explain.
It seemed especially embarrassing at 27.
Surely, by now, I was supposed to know where I was going.
I thought adulthood would feel more definite
When I was younger, 27 sounded impressively grown-up.
Twenty-seven-year-olds had matching plates. They booked annual leave strategically. They had opinions about interest rates and knew whether they wanted children.
At 17, I imagined my adult life as a sequence of decisions I would make once and then confidently inhabit.
University.
Career.
Love.
Home.
Marriage, probably.
Children, possibly, although in my teenage imagination they appeared more as charming accessories than actual human beings who might wake me at four in the morning.
The details were blurry, but I assumed certainty would arrive with age.
Instead, age arrived without it.
I became good at appearing more certain than I felt.
At work, I was the organised one. I remembered deadlines. I brought a phone charger. I had paracetamol in my handbag and knew how to make a complicated spreadsheet look less frightening.
My younger sister rang me when she needed advice.
My mother asked me to explain things on websites.
Friends described me as sensible.
I liked being dependable. I also sometimes wanted to scream when somebody said, “You’ll know what to do.”
Because increasingly, I didn’t.
Feeling lost in your 20s when everyone else has a plan
The problem was not that everyone around me was wildly successful.
It was that they seemed decided.
One friend wanted to make partner at her firm. Another wanted to leave London before she had children. Someone else had frozen her eggs and described the decision with the calm satisfaction of a person who had finally sorted out the spare room.
Even my friend who hated her job knew precisely what she hated about it.
I envied that.
Meanwhile, I had started opening property websites even though I didn’t know where I wanted to live.
I saved photographs of strangers’ kitchens.
I looked at engagement rings, even though I didn’t currently have anyone who might reasonably give me one.
Then, in another tab, I searched for teaching courses, writing retreats in Scotland and one-way flights to Lisbon.
Apparently my five-year plan was either a semi-detached house with bifold doors or disappearing into Europe with a notebook.
I told nobody this.
Instead, I said things like, “I’m just seeing what happens.”
It sounded relaxed.
What I meant was: I am terrified that I am wasting time because I cannot decide what kind of life I want, but I’m learning that embracing this ambiguity is part of growing into myself.
There were things I wanted once that had begun to feel oddly borrowed.
I had spent years pursuing promotions because progression was what ambitious people did. Then my manager mentioned a possible senior role, and instead of feeling excited, I felt tired.
Not dramatically tired.
Just a small internal sinking.
I smiled anyway.
“Definitely something I’d be interested in,” I heard myself say.
On the train home, I wondered why I had said yes to a future I did not particularly want.
That frightened me more than not having a plan.
The life I wanted started changing before I admitted it
Nothing collapsed.
There was no dramatic resignation, breakup or midnight epiphany.
My old life simply began rubbing at me like a shoe that technically still fitted.
I stopped enjoying conversations about “where things were going”.
I became irritated when relatives asked whether I was seeing anyone, then guilty because I knew they meant no harm.
At weddings, I cried during the vows and wondered whether I wanted marriage or whether I simply wanted to be wanted that certainly.
I loved my friends’ babies and handed them back without the expected ache.
Then I worried about the absence of the ache.
Was I supposed to want motherhood by now?
Would I want it later?
What if later was too late?
What if I built my life around something I eventually realised I never wanted?
No answer seemed capable of becoming regret.
The strangest part was that I missed the younger version of myself, so certain.
She was exhausting, but she had direction.
She made lists.
She believed effort could solve almost anything.
She thought becoming yourself meant gradually adding things: qualifications, relationships, money, confidence, beautiful furniture.
Nobody had told her that becoming might also involve subtraction.
The question I finally stopped answering properly
A few weeks after the evening in the car, I met my friend Hannah for dinner.
She had recently become engaged.
Halfway through our meal, she told me about venues, then stopped and looked at me.
“What do you actually want at the moment?”
“Chips,” I said.
She laughed.
“No. With everything.”
Normally, I would have produced something respectable.
A promotion.
A house deposit.
Maybe travel.
Something that suggested momentum.
Instead, I looked down at the smear of ketchup on my plate.
“I don’t know.”
Hannah shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
That was it.
No alarm.
No intervention.
The waiter did not confiscate my adulthood.
Nobody appeared with a clipboard to inform me that I had failed to meet the developmental requirements of being 27.
We ordered another drink.
But something about saying it aloud stayed with me.
I don’t know.
It sounded less like a confession once it was outside my head.
I am not sure certainty is what I am missing
I still compare myself.
I wish I could say I stopped.
I have congratulated somebody on an engagement and then spent twenty minutes wondering whether I have made terrible romantic choices.
I have watched friends buy homes and briefly interpreted my rented flat as evidence of personal failure.
Sometimes I see a woman my age pushing a pram while holding a coffee and think she possesses some secret knowledge about adulthood that I missed while scrolling through restaurant menus.
But I am beginning to notice something else.
Certainty is not the same thing as happiness.
And uncertainty is not necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong.
Some of my friends who look certain are frightened too. They just have different questions.
A mortgage does not eliminate doubt.
Marriage does not make identity permanent.
Neither does a job title, motherhood, singledom, travelling the world or staying exactly where you are.
I am still not sure what I want my thirties to look like.
Some evenings it feels possible.
Other times, it feels like standing in a station after the departure board has gone blank.
Last Tuesday, I parked outside my flat again.
My phone buzzed before I had even turned off the engine.
Another message in the group chat.
A friend had been offered a new job.
I typed, “That’s amazing. Congratulations,” and meant it.
Then I sat there for a moment.
Not eleven minutes this time.
Maybe three.
Upstairs, my laundry was probably still on the radiator. There was nothing particularly exciting waiting for me, and I had made no sudden decisions about careers, babies, houses, love or Lisbon.
I picked up my bag and went inside anyway.
For now, I am 27.
I am grateful.
I am frightened.
I am curious.
I am less certain than I expected.
And perhaps the most unfamiliar thing is that I am finally trying not to turn that uncertainty into proof that I am behind.
