THE PRESSURE OF WANTING TO HAVE YOUR LIFE FIGURED OUT EARLY.

At the age of eighteen, you`re expected to know what you want to become. At twenty, you're meant to be making progress. By twenty-five, you should have everything together already. 

Somewhere along the way, growing up stopped being about discovering who you are and became a race for you to prove that you already know. 

We are constantly asked questions that sound simple but aren't. Questions like; “What career path are you choosing?” “What do you want to do with your life?” “Where do you see yourself in six years to come?” and so on. We are expected to have answers before we even have enough time and space to figure out the questions. 

The pressure doesn't necessarily come from our parents or teachers. They sometimes come from the people around us, we watch someone our age build a career, get scholarships and start up a business and suddenly it feels like our own lives are inadequate. We start wondering if we're behind. But behind who exactly? 

There is no stereotype for becoming a person. Some people discover what they love at sixteen while some at the age of thirty. Some people choose a career and stay with it for many decades while some change their minds along the way. Some people know exactly where they are going while others take many wrong turns before finding somewhere that feels right to them. And none of these mean one person is doing better than the other in life.  

Perhaps one of the biggest problems of growing up nowadays is that we`ve confused certainty with success.  

We admire people who seem to know what they are doing, but certainty doesn't always mean someone has their life figured out. Sometimes, it just means they've chosen a direction and choosing a direction doesn't mean you can't change it. 

We are allowed to change our minds. We are allowed to realise that the dreams we had at sixteen isn`t necessarily going to be the same one we would want to have at twenty-four. We are allowed to try something new, fail, learn from our mistakes and start all over again. 

We need to stop treating uncertainty as a problem, maybe it is a part of growing. There is nothing disappointing about saying; “I don`t know yet”.

There is even courage in it. Because sometimes the pressure of making sure we have everything figured out makes us choose lives we don`t actually want just because they look impressive from the outside. 

We choose careers because they sound successful, we want achievements because they make us feel valued. And then somewhere in the process of all these, we tend to forget to ask the most important question: “What do I actually want?” 

Maybe growing up shouldn't be a race towards a perfectly planned future. Maybe it should be a process where we discover ourselves, change directions and become versions of ourselves we couldn`t have ever imagined while growing up. 

You don't need to have your life figured out at the age of eighteen. You don`t have to be successful on someone else's timeline. You`re allowed to work in your own pace, you`re not late.   

You`re living your life, not completing a checklist