Everyone who acts like they have their life 100% figured out is pretending.
That’s the first truth you start to understand in your twenties. No matter how put together someone seems, there’s something they’re still trying to make sense of.
And right now for seniors at Marshall University and across the country, that feeling of needing to make sense of it all might be amplified.
Graduation is quickly approaching and there is a countdown attached to everything — final assignments, last classes, last laughs with classmates you won’t see again on the daily. It’s a slow yet rapid closing of a chapter that has defined you for the last four years.
This feeling comes along with this quiet, creeping pressure that you’re supposed to have a plan. Not just a plan, but a perfect plan approved by everyone around you, I might add.
As if one huge life change was not enough, you have to have the perfect job lined up and a perfect city chosen to live in because you can’t stay in your college town of course. You must have a perfect version of your life that makes sense to not just you, but to everybody.
But, do you really have to?
If you’re a graduating senior and you don’t have it all figured out, I, as a graduating senior who does not have it all figured out, am here to tell you that that is more than okay.
More than okay, it’s normal.
Fifty-two percent of recent four-year college graduates are unemployed for a year after graduation, according to a 2024 report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute. Likewise, 45% of those graduates will hold a job that does not require a college degree a decade down the line.
All this to say, the idea that everyone else has this linear path and you’re the only one who feels behind is a hoax.
Comparison has a way of making other people’s lives look complete while yours feels unfinished. But honestly, most people are just better at hiding their uncertainty or masking it with confidence.
Being in your twenties feels less like a breakthrough and more like standing in a room full of your peers and realizing everyone around you is silently fighting a battle they are too embarrassed to name.
You walk into class and it looks normal. Inside those four walls, however, there are a dozen different timelines colliding at once.
The girl who sits next to you cried herself to sleep because her brand new apartment doesn’t echo with familiarity quite yet.
The guy across the room from you works a job his soon to be degree overqualifies him for but he keeps telling himself it’s temporary while he continues to live at home because financial independence feels out of reach.
The guy next to him has his entire life lined up through family connections but he struggles to find passion in the future that is laid out for him.
The girl on your other side just got engaged but only said yes out of fear of being alone forever.
And the one kid at the front of the room actually does have everything figured out and is currently feeling no pressure in terms of post grad life because for some reason life really is easy for lucky people.
Almost everyone looks composed and is pretending to know what they’re doing.
That’s the part the rom-coms and coming of age films don’t prepare you for. Your twenties are usually not glamorous, but rather, they are uneven and disorienting.
I mean after all, we can’t all be Rory Gilmore from “Gilmore Girls” and remedy our problems with a witty chat with our mother over a cup of coffee.
You’re the same as all of your peers, but the distance between your lives can feel gigantic.
We are all trying to build something solid while the ground beneath us continues to be pulled from our feet.
Everyone quietly carries along even while undergoing huge life changes, and the ability to do that is what adulthood has prepared you for.
The ability to quietly move along while you have so many unanswered questions floating in your head becomes your new normal.
That is what will get you through. Not clarity, not having all the answers, not having a perfect plan, but rather awareness that you will continue to carry everything as you always have, quietly moving forward in the world.
Even if you don’t have all the answers yet or every aspect of your life figured out, the ability to recognize that everyone is pretending to have it all solved, just like you, will somehow be enough to push you into this next chapter.
Kaitlyn Fleming can be contacted at [email protected].
