Hey twenty-somethings: we don’t have it figured out either, we’re just better at hiding it

I am 45 years old and I opened a blank draft this morning and sat there for a solid ten minutes wondering if I had anything worth saying.

Ten minutes. Nineteen years of blogging. Still sat there.

So if you are in your twenties reading this, thinking that people my age have somehow cracked the code — I am so sorry. We absolutely have not. We are just better at not texting anyone about it at 2am.

Is everyone in their forties secretly panicking?

Yes. Basically. Not all the time — but more than we let on.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you’re younger: the questions don’t get answered as you age, they just get more specific and more embarrassing to admit out loud. At 25 you’re asking ‘what do I want to do with my life.’ At 45 you’re asking ‘wait, is this my life?’ Both questions are terrifying. Only one of them has a socially acceptable excuse attached to it.

I keep having the same conversation with women my age. Over coffee, in the comments, in DMs that start with ‘okay don’t judge me but.’ We are all saying the same thing in different fonts: we don’t know what’s next, we’re scared to say it, and we say it anyway. Quietly. To each other.

That has to count for something.

What does ‘having it together’ actually look like from the inside?

From the outside, I get it. Forty-five looks assembled. There’s a career, there’s a history, there’s the general vibe of someone who knows where her car keys are.

From the inside, every morning is still basically that Empire Records line — ‘so what is with today, today’ — except I’m not a twenty-something in a record store. I’m a grown woman who has built an entire life around just being herself, and some days that feels like the bravest thing I’ve ever done and other days it feels completely unhinged.

Both things are probably true at the same time. That’s the part they don’t put in the brochure.

Why does the self-doubt not just go away already?

I’ve been doing this blog since 2006. Nineteen years. The self-doubt has been here for all of them. It does not care about my track record. It shows up fresh every time, completely unbothered, like it pays rent.

What changes is that you get faster at working through it. You stop waiting for it to leave before you start typing. You write anyway, which — if you think about it — is kind of the whole job.

But the doubt itself? Still there. Anyone who tells you it disappears after a certain age is either lying or selling something. In my last rant about turning 40, I thought that birthday was the big existential speed bump. Forty-five has a different texture. Less ‘oh no I’m old’ and more ‘wait, who am I actually trying to be here.’ That second question is scarier. And honestly kind of exciting, if I’m being real about it.

Does getting older mean getting more lost or more honest?

Both, weirdly. The two things travel together.

The women I admire most right now aren’t the ones who have it figured out. They’re the ones who stopped performing like they do. There’s a specific relief that comes from being around someone who will just say ‘I don’t know’ without apologizing for it. That’s not a midlife crisis. That’s midlife honesty, and it’s actually kind of great.

Research on midlife identity from the American Psychological Association backs this up — midlife is genuinely one of the most turbulent periods of identity reassessment, and it tends to resolve into something better. I’m not in the ‘something better’ part yet, but I can see it from here.

Why does everyone at this age keep talking about connection?

Every woman I talk to at this stage uses the same word: connection. We are striving for it, rearranging schedules around it, borderline desperate for it in a way that would have embarrassed our younger selves.

And I think I know why. The routines shift. The things that used to fill the calendar start to thin out. And you look around going — okay, but who are my people RIGHT now? Who actually knows me, not just the version of me from ten years ago?

That question feels enormous. It also feels like exactly the right question to be asking. Better late than never, and all that.

What do I actually want from whatever comes next?

Honest answer: I don’t fully know. And I’ve decided that’s not a failure — it’s just where I am right now.

I know I want more conversations that feel real. Less performing, more actually talking. I want to write things that make someone feel like they’re not the only one sitting alone going ‘is this normal.’ That’s been the whole point over at this blog since before most social platforms existed, and that specific part I’m still sure about.

Everything else is a work in progress. But what do I know.

Here’s the thing I keep landing on though: ‘not knowing’ doesn’t have to mean ‘not okay.’ Those are two different things. We’ve been treating them like the same thing for way too long — and we have been doing that to ourselves AND to the twenty-somethings who are watching us and assuming we figured it out somewhere along the way.

We didn’t. We just got quieter about it.

You’re welcome. And also, I’m sorry.

So if you are twenty-three and feel like you’re the only one who has no idea what you’re doing — hi. You’re not. There are forty-five-year-olds doing the exact same thing with better skincare and more back pain.

Maybe we all just need to be a little louder about the not-knowing. Because it’s not a phase you grow out of. It’s just life. And life, it turns out, does not come with a finished draft.

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