I Thought I’d Have Figured It Out By Now

By Stella Speridon-Violet

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I remember telling my peers in high school that I’d rather kill myself than work a 9-5, and here I am, doing just that, still alive. 

At sixteen, I’d just tell myself “I’ll figure it out,” with no real plan or direction for what I wanted to do or be known for. I just assumed that one day everything would click. I’d wake up with a fully formed identity, a career path, and an answer to the question adults seemed to ask at every family gathering: “So, what do you want to do with your life?” 

The truth is, I thought by now I’d have figured it out. 

When you’re young, adulthood feels like a finish line. You imagine that by twenty-five you’ll have become a complete person. You’ll know where you’re going, who you’re dating, what your purpose is, and maybe even have a matching furniture set that wasn’t rescued from Facebook Marketplace. 

Instead, adulthood feels more like wandering through a desolate, sketchy park at night, desperately trying to make it home. Convincing yourself you know where you’re headed because everyone around you already made it home hours ago. 

Somewhere along the way, “I’ll figure it out” stopped becoming a promise and became a coping mechanism. 

I said it when I changed my major. I said it when I hated my first job. I said it when relationships ended. 

I said it when I watched friends move to their dream city, get a job right out of college, start a business, or seemingly build lives that looked complete from the outside. 

“I’ll figure it out.”

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The funny thing is that I always imagined figuring it out would feel dramatic, like a movie scene where everything suddenly made perfect sense. An epiphany. A moment of clarity. 

Instead, life has mostly been a series of small decisions made with incomplete information. 

You take a job because you need money, or you move because your lease is up. You pursue an opportunity because it sounds interesting. You fall in love with things or people you never planned to. You abandon your dreams, which you once thought defined you. 

Then one day, you look around and realize your life wasn’t built for certainty; rather, it was built from improvisation. 

For a generation raised on unlimited options, figuring it out feels harder than ever. We grew up being told we could be anything. Nobody warned us that having infinite possibilities often feels more overwhelming than freeing. 

Every choice feels permanent, like this is your life now, everything is set in stone for the foreseeable future. Every career path feels like a referendum on your worth. Every glance at social media becomes evidence that everyone else is somehow moving faster. 

You may even look at me and think I have everything I’ve ever wanted, but I don’t. Actually quite far from it. 

I sit at my desk some days and wonder if this is really it. But maybe that’s the lie that we’ve all been sold: that there is an “it.”

That there’s a final version of ourselves waiting somewhere in the future. That one day we’ll arrive. 

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Lately, I’ve started wondering if nobody actually figures it out. Maybe the people I admire are just as confused as I am. 

Maybe confidence isn’t certainty. Maybe it’s learning how to move forward despite uncertainty. Maybe adulthood isn’t about finding answers. Maybe it’s about becoming comfortable with questions. 

The older I get, the more I realize that life isn’t asking me to have a master plan. It’s asking me to pay attention and to decide for myself what I want. To notice what excites me, and what doesn’t. To leave if I’m uncomfortable or unhappy. To trust that not knowing doesn’t mean I’m lost. 

I still don’t know exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life, and it genuinely freaks me out most days. Sometimes I feel so far behind and lost while everyone around me is filled with optimism and hope, and I feel like the loneliest girl in the world. 

To be real, I keep a lot to myself and pretend everything’s okay and that I’m living my dream, when really I’m terrified of what my life looks like. I constantly compare myself to people who seem to have it all figured out… but I’m beginning to learn that nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly becomes the person they were meant to be. No, they become that person gradually—through one choice at a time. 

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I won’t give up on what I want, even if I’m not fully sure what that is yet. 

And maybe that is what “figuring it out” means.