emphasis on “late”

Amid my morning doom scroll that knows no bounds, I swipe up to find the next Instagram reel (I had just closed TikTok to start my day but found myself here instead).

A couple dancing. The song that goes “What a lie, what a lie, what a lie.” And the text: “You’ll never meet the love of your life if you don’t find them by 27.”

Holy shit, are people saying that? Do people really think that? Should I think that? Should I have found a man to pay my father a dowry for my hand in marriage? Well, more than one issue there, I suppose. I redirect my habitual scroll to LinkedIn; it seems more productive.

Everyone and their mother has passed the board with a score high enough to waive into any UBE jurisdiction. My mother has taken another course or completed another certificate or something of the sort. The few writing job postings I find ask for 3-5 years of experience for $40k. My Master’s in English doesn’t count. $40k would hardly cover my rent anyway.

It’s my late twenties and I feel late. I feel so late. I have three cats in a one bedroom apartment I can hardly afford and my only answer to what I want to be when I grow up is “decently happy.” I am 26 and have no idea what I’m meant to be doing or even what I want to be doing and answering those questions isn’t even the most important thing I have to do. I’m 26 and my cat just put her toes in my glass of water (thanks queen).

At 26, my dad was six years into his career. At 26, my mom had two children. At 26, I am unemployed (by choice), I am single (not by choice), and I am lost (half by choice, half not by choice). But people always said I so successful, so smart, so talented– how did I get here?

I was a theatre kid in high school. I loved theatre, I loved acting, and I loved the way I felt when I could tell an audience was connecting with my performance. I really struggled with leaving it all behind after high school, but I never considered pursuing acting as a career, not even slightly. It wasn’t stable, there were no guarantees, and I knew it would cause my parents to worry about me. So, rather than broach the subject with them or even kick it around in my own brain, I decided to leave it alone and go the responsible route which, in my case, was biomedical engineering.

Clearly, as I write this on my non-lucrative blog, something fell apart along the way. The thing that fell apart, or more accurately, made its grand debut, was ADHD. I wouldn’t figure that out for another four years, but it made it incredibly difficult for me to pay attention and understand the science courses I was taking. Between biomedical engineering and graduation, I tried on many different majors, but the one that stuck was English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. Now, I understood at the time that this meant I’d be less employable (which I think is truly insane as the art of effective communication can’t be taken for granted, but that could be an entire blog post in itself so we’ll leave that here), but the goal was always to further my education anyway, and as I’d been told, more education makes you more employable so I wasn’t worried.

After graduation, I went home to my parents’ home and thought about what my next steps were, as most college graduates do. After a few years of work, a global pandemic, and an ADHD diagnosis, I went back to school to get my Master’s in English, with the goal of being a middle school teacher or a college professor. Life got derailed however, as life often does, and I didn’t actually explore either of those career possibilities fully, as my dad got sick and then passed away only a few months into the program. I was wrecked, to put it mildly, but I put my head down and got through the work to graduate. I graduated as I promised my dad I would, and then looked for a job, just to do something mindless while I took care of myself and until I could figure out what I really wanted.

I landed in administrative work. The specifics aren’t too important here, but in short, the first job I took didn’t pay enough and made me question my sanity, and the second paid well but demanded ownership of every second of my time and didn’t understand why that wasn’t something I could accept. I was miserable in both, and it was impossible for me to rationalize trading my passions, my social life, and my health for a paycheck, much less one that was well under six figures. After losing my dad less than three months after his 55th birthday, I realized time and health are our most valuable and unpredictable resources; when I realized my hair was falling out from malnutrition and I hadn’t felt rested in months, I knew I couldn’t stay.

I had known from high school, at the very least, that our generation would need to go to college and maybe grad school after that to get the stability our parents had had without those qualifications. I had known that buying a home would be harder. I had known that focusing on STEM-related fields would mean better job security. And so I tried to do all of that. I tried to focus on STEM and when I ultimately left that behind, I knew it meant less stability and a pay cut. But I got the Bachelors degree and the advanced degree, and got both early and with distinction. I took the job outside of the fields I wanted to be in to have a chance to have stability and security. I had done what I was supposed to do, what guidance counselors and teachers and nearly every other adult told me to do, and it got me here: to a job that demanded everything I had and paid me pennies for it. The options laid out for me were to follow my passion and struggle financially, or be responsible and have enough money to enjoy life. So how the fuck was I both unhappy and financially unstable?

Our generation was sold the American Dream, and we were told that if we just worked a little harder than our parents, we could have it. And here we are, in our mid- to late-twenties, realizing that’s just not the case. We abandoned our true passions and dreams to have the one that was attainable– a family, a home with a wraparound porch, and a golden retriever– and it turns out, the great and powerful Oz is just a man behind a curtain, hoping we’ll buy into funding his social security benefits. I don’t mean to say we were purposefully misled, but more that we trusted what we were told, when those telling us really didn’t know much either. We expected to be like our parents, if only we put in the work.

Our parents’ generation, and really all those before ours, got married younger, had kids younger, bought homes younger (but honestly, buying a home at all is a feat we may not have the privilege of achieving), and had lower barriers for entering the workforce. So yes, sure, we feel late because we’re judging ourselves based on what our high school peers are doing now on Instagram, but I think we’re judging ourselves more based on what our parents did, what their parents did, and what older people in the media are saying. They don’t get it though, not really. We can’t pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We can’t walk into X place, shake their hand, and be offered a job on the spot (I tried and The Boston Globe has locked offices). We have advanced degrees (with the debt to match, but god forbid we get our loans forgiven because Elmer with his social security number of 1 paid back his $17 student loan debt without the help of the government) and the jobs we can get, after months of searching, pay us little more than we’d make working in retail and generally less than we’d make serving. We can’t meet our spouse through a friend of a friend or in the supermarket or in a third location that doesn’t exist. Even if it did exist, we’re saving money for the house we’ll never have, so we can’t spend money on frivolous outings. We have so much fucking anxiety about what to spend money on because we don’t have enough, we’ll never have enough, and somehow it’s tasteless to say we don’t have enough. This isn’t the life we prepared for. This isn’t where we thought we’d be.

But now we’re 26, 27, 28, 29, and we hadn’t planned for this life; we put everything into getting where everyone told us we were meant to be. We’re in our mid- to late-twenties exploring what we want out of life because if we can’t live the American Dream, we figure we might as well be happy.

It’s scary to realize you aren’t sure what would make you truly happy. It’s scary to realize it’s been over a decade since you’ve let yourself really dream. When I first decided to actively explore the question of what I want out of life, it was near impossible to let my mind wander past what felt probable, mostly because it felt too late to start on anything that felt far-fetched like writing or acting. Dreaming and starting over is not an easy task by any means. But what would be harder is waking up at 50 realizing I spent over 20 years overextending myself for a job that did not fulfill me in the slightest. Who knows if I would be married or have kids (two things that I know I want) if I spent all my good years going “above and beyond” in a “fast-paced environment?”

I don’t write this to encourage everyone to quit their jobs and explore their passions– I know this is a privilege that not everyone has and I have never taken it for granted. What I do want to say, however (and forgive me for stating my main takeaway so clearly, but the message is too important to risk), is that you’re not the only person that feels like they’re even more lost in their mid- to late-twenties than they were at 18. And it’s not too late, even when it feels like it. Exploring what I want out of life at 26 has been difficult because I feel more bound by financial responsibilities, but it also feels so much more free. At 18 and 21 and 23, I worried about what people might think of me. I would never have posted a blog so publicly (high school Kayla is clutching her Tumblr pearls right now). I would have died at the thought of people I knew finding the Instagram accounts I made to explore different interests I had. I would never have wanted anyone to know that I was struggling, probably in the same ways they were. Now, I love being able to share my hobbies and I embrace being strange in public, because my joy is so much more important that what anyone else thinks of me. 

So explore, dream, and share if you feel like you want to. Your job is not all you have. If you’re working and are making yourself miserable all to fund the last 15 years of your life, I want to tell you they’re not guaranteed. Do what you love now, in whatever capacity you can. This is the only life you get; don’t live it being miserable because of a choice you made at 18.