release the need to have it all figured out

catchups and reunions in your twenties

Jun 13, 2025

Hi friends,

Reunions and catchups in your twenties are quite something.

There's the friend who lets you into their juicy office gossip. Another who is deep in the search for their next flat.

You meet another friend's first kid and watch them become a parent right in front of your eyes. You stare in awe at how confident they are with a crying baby and glowing in a way you've never seen before.

Someone else is thriving in their traveling era.

Many are funemployed, or just unemployed. Freelancing or building their own path. Figuring out their next moves or simply taking a breath for the moment.

Others are contemplating quitting every other day, questioning their path, their purpose, their worth.

Friends are transitioning or finally settling into their ideal routine. Settling into routines they'll probably change again in three months.

All while questioning whether they’ve made a huge mistake.

You catch people at different stages.

The excitement after an internal breakthrough, the most at peace and happy they've ever been, feeling completely stagnant, or going through the absolute worst of it all.

All these small and big updates get rolled into a single conversation over a meal, a drink or a random Facetime.

You think you're the only one not having it figured out. You think you are the only one that panics. You think everyone else seems to know something you don't.

No, it is not just you.

But i didn't fully understand this until my college roommate's wedding last month, where i felt time folding in on itself. It was a magical day that I wanted to hold onto forever.

Each conversation transported me back eight years. We were all freshman babies then, a little lost and confused, but somehow it was all good.

The inexplicable nostalgia lingered in the air like perfume you can't quite place. The food and boba runs, walks across campus rushing to the next class, the dorms where we first met.

But something shifted after that night. Surrounded by all these people I’ve spent so much time with, seeing how far we'd all come from those uncertain eighteen year olds, I felt so much more okay with my own progress.

Maybe it was finally grieving that college version of myself, or remembering just how much I've changed and grown. Maybe it was realising that everyone in that room had traveled their own path to get to where they are now, and none of us have it all figured out then or now.

Figuring your life out exists in the space between resisting and fully devoting yourself to this new version of who you're becoming.

Progress towards your new self doesn’t mean that nostalgia or familiarity doesn’t pull you back a few steps to old routines and habits. And if there is nothing clear in sight at the moment, it doesn’t mean you aren’t being led somewhere.

Sometimes you need to see your own growth reflected in the eyes of people who knew you, to remember that becoming is a slow, imperfect, beautiful process that we're all stumbling through together.