Playground of Progress

The real question is: who does have it all figured out? If you find yourself answering this question without any hesitation - congratulations! If not, don’t worry. You’re part of the overwhelming majority of young people who have little to no clue, navigating the chaos of becoming without a map. 

I find myself at odds whenever someone asks what I want to be. When I look toward my future, I instinctively imagine Sylvia Plath’s fig tree - standing before a branching path where every single leaf represents a completely different life. I can easily see myself excelling in ten completely different career paths, living in eight different cities, adding two more minors to my degree, exploring endless mediums, and collecting hobbies like they’re tokens.

My path has never left completely linear, and little to nothing about my transition into adulthood has felt completely traditional, either. I’ve fallen in love with a multitude of mediums, people, and places, and I can’t imagine what my life would look like without this trend. I’ve always kept my arms open to the possibility of opportunity, refusing to lock the door on any potential version of myself. 

We live in a culture obsessed with immediate readiness. We are taught to curate polished identities, build clear-cut career trajectories in deeply unpredictable landscapes, and reach arbitrary milestones on a strict schedule. The gap between youth and adulthood feels as if it’s narrowing at a sudden rate, and the pressure to choose a single branch on the fig tree can feel deafening. 

Yet - there is a distinct emotional truth to how we actually experience this stage - it often feels like a prolonged game of playing dress-up.

Putting on the uniform of adulthood is an act of performance itself. We project structure, button up our ambition, and signal capability to the outside world to prove that we have our trajectories mapped out; we wear seriousness like armor. But underneath that exterior, there is an equal urge to drop the front, protect our softness, and retain the lighthearted freedom of childhood.

That brings us to a quiet distinction I find myself rarely addressing in my own life: the difference between surviving and living.

Surviving in this landscape is easy enough to optimize. It’s about preservation - sticking to the script, keeping your head down, and choosing the most straightforward branch because security demands it. For so many, survival isn’t a choice - it is an absolute necessity driven by circumstance. Recognizing this reveals an important truth: having the space to experiment, to wander down detours, and to deliberate over which branch to pick is itself a profound privilege. To be able to ask “Who do I want to become?” rather than “How will I make it through tomorrow?” is a gift we cannot afford to take for granted.

But if survival keeps you intact, living demands friction. To truly live - to expand, evolve, and step into genuine selfhood - you have to accept the bruises that come with vulnerability. You have to risk making mistakes, taking wrong turns, and being open to bearing growing pains. Growth is rarely clean or comfortable; it requires us to endure the scrapes, wrong turns, and growing pains that only happen when we dare to step off the paved path. 

There is an ongoing tension between who we feel forced to project out into the world and who we actually are when all that noise fades away. On one hand, we want to be taken seriously - to protect ambition, structure, and capability. On the other hand, there is an instinct to protect our softness, maintain flexibility, and admit that underneath the surface, we are often just figuring out things as we go. We are caught in a truce between desire to step into full maturity and the equal desire to stay unfettered and open to change. 

Joan Didion captured this necessity of preserving our past selves in her essay On Keeping a Notebook: 

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad nightstand demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

Holding onto that playfulness - allowing ourselves to play dress-up while taking real risks - is how we keep that door open. There is a pervasive myth that adulthood is where joy goes to die, that seriousness must swallow curiosity whole. But look around at the older people who move through the world with genuine vitality: they are often the ones who never abandoned play. They prove that growing up doesn’t equate to growing cold.

There is no maximum capacity for human growth. Development isn’t a task you complete in your twenties and check off a list; it follows us across an entire lifespan. What makes the transition from teenagehood to adulthood feel so terrifying is simply due the fact that is our first drastic point of change. It’s the first time the training wheels come off.

The standard timeline we are sold is mostly an illusion. The pressure to have a five-year plan ignores how human beings actually grow: in fits, side quests, and sudden shifts in direction. Wanting multiple futures at once isn’t always a direct sign of indecision or lack of discipline; it can be a sign of deep curiosity.

I know there is still time. More importantly, I know that I work best on my own timelines - not on a standard someone else has set for me.

Real maturity has never been about abandoning the playground to wear a stiff suit everyday. It’s about having the confidence to own the space between - standing openly in your ambition while honoring the quiet, unpolished, wonderful, and sometimes messy truth of where you are right now.