There is no shortage of thoughts being offered in all possible mediums on life as a twenty something year old. This time of life is such fodder for written and spoken outpourings–bewilderment, excitement and existential crises seem to be particularly common themes. If you don’t expunge some of this somewhere, you’re bound to explode. Seeing as I’m in my 20s and bewildered, I felt it fit to add to the pile of endless musings and ruminations.

Whether it’s just the age or the loosening of institutional structure, there seems to be a definite turn inward in your 20s. The change isn’t something you outwardly see, but suddenly you find yourself much more often left, whether by necessity or time, to your thoughts. You’re deciding a lot more for yourself now, and severing old decision-making mechanisms you once relied on. It’s possible you may only be hanging on by a thread to your parents’ authority by the time you turn 26, after which, for real, it is time to assume responsibility for your own health insurance too. Naturally the weight of all these decisions and actions to make necessitates looking within, rather than relying on a select array of choices arranged attractively before you, buffet-style. If only we could know with certainty that this plate of meatloaf will sit well with us and doesn’t contain any nasty surprises, or that this veggie salad is as key to our health and happiness as we think it is.

A consequence of this increased introspection, I have found, is constant reevaluation, shock and realization–a consistent need to update your views on things as you realize how very wrong you were, how many childish things you have yet to put away. I’ll go into one of these in this post. Using the turn of phrase of this generation, I’ll call it the mythical promise of “getting one’s shit together.”

This is a myth we consciously or unconsciously take great stock in, starting when we’re kids and following through into our 20s and, as I suspect, even beyond that. “Getting one’s shit together” is the comforting promise that once you’ve done all these things you’re supposed to do—go to school, work hard, get a job, move out, etcetera—then, then it’ll all make sense, you’ll become who you’re supposed to be, then life can begin. Many of us seem to operate on this promise of a clearer, more assured future, obtainable only once all of our “shit”, whatever that may personally entail, is together.

But I’ve personally only just begun to realize how ill conceived this promise of a clearer tomorrow is. Reaching milestones, accomplishing this or that goal often leaves me with more questions, revisions, and reconsiderations than ever. You can chalk this up to having a grand total of 23 years of life experience. But do you ever really reach a point in your life when the dust settles and you can say something—anything, really—with absolute confidence and certainty? Am I going to wake up one morning, in my mid-thirties in the penthouse apartment of my dreams (or wherever) and think to myself, Ah, yes. I know who I am, and it all makes sense, and it’s all okay from now on. I know what I’m doing in life and I get it. I get it now. But at what point is one’s shit together? When you’ve obtained a certain job title, when you’re earning a particular salary? When you’ve made that one big purchase you’re supposed to make, or had that family you’re supposed to have? Or when we merely wake up in our own apartment with a fervent certainty of ourselves?

What I’m realizing is closer to the truth is that no one really knows what they’re doing. No amount of goals you achieve or milestones you reach or relationships you forge will make your path absolutely certain. If this were so, maybe there wouldn’t be as much point to this thing called life after all. Uncertainty would end with your triumph, but then what? Life goes on and continues to present challenges to face, which by virtue of being challenges we can’t be absolutely sure of how to surmount. Much as we humans hate uncertainty, it is both okay and completely natural to be uncertain. It is, indeed, unavoidable, and not something you can cut out of your life.

The idea that one day you’ll have it all figured out is a comforting one, but perhaps also a limiting one. It actually makes uncertainty more painful than it needs to be and less easy to accept. It denies the reality that we change, constantly, and that we’re learning something new everyday. It denies us the right to change our minds, or to want to explore other sides of ourselves. It also makes us rely too much on external things that are out of our control to bring us a sense of peace, when in reality peace is always accessible to us, whenever we need it and despite what we have or haven’t done.

So here’s to letting go of the stress and overexertion to figure it all out at all—and the panic when it doesn’t seem to be happening. If clarity comes for us, as undoubtedly moments of it will, let it come. But the universe is vast and wide and largely unknowable, much like our own inner selves. In the meantime, we can still be at peace with uncertainty, simply due to it being perhaps the most natural, the most human state to be in.

Gone for me is the illusion that adults have it all figured out, and that things can ever be completely figured out. Gone is the idea that anything exterior to me will hasten or bring about clarity. For this I am sure–we must turn inward.