I’m trying to make sense of the mess that is my early 20s. I’m not doing a good job of it but I don’t think I’m supposed to.

I’m caught in between constant contradictions, I really want to start pursuing a career that I love, but I don’t know what that career is and I’m not sure what I love, I want to try everything but then I’m spread too thin and I burn out which brings me back to square one. Landing in your early 20s feels like a bomb’s just gone off, everything’s been thrown into the air and you don’t know where your life will land but you’re scrambling to catch as much as you can. You’ll be able to hold onto some things, but most of it will smash at your feet and you’ll have to rebuild.

Discombobulated.

That’s the only way that I can aptly describe my first couple of years in my 20s and each day I wake up more and more confused.

There’s no clear guidance telling you where to go or how to do something or when to draw the line, you’re constructing something out of invisible blocks never knowing what the bigger picture is, what it will look like or when it will reveal itself.

Staring directly into the unknown is easily the most intimidating factor that I’m coming to terms with but it’s equally the most freeing. The thought that anything could be ahead of you feels overwhelming and sometimes too much to comprehend. Life has such a vast experience and you don’t know where you will slot in. The ideas that you have seldom go to plan and often times you encounter things on the fly and you just have to roll with it.

I’ve found that I think in the extremes, for example at my job if one small thing goes wrong in my head it seems rational to plan my resignation, begin job searches on LinkedIn, and review my contract to see how much notice I have to give before I can escape. Once things settle down and revert back to normal, as they usually do, I can appreciate that my thoughts above were a bit rash in hindsight. I’m not sure how to temper these feelings or whether I should, maybe everything is supposed to feel like an Imax cinema, loud, in your face, and inescapable. It swings in the complete opposite direction too. Sometimes you’re met with silence that makes you feel stagnated in a world where everyone else is moving forward as they leave you behind.

There’s no rhyme and reason to a lot of things, it’s just a swirling vortex of weird, unanswerable questions, and it’s up to you to decide the answer.