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So, there I was at 11:32pm last Tuesday, crouched on my kitchen floor with a YouTube video titled “How to fix a fridge that sounds like an injured dinosaur”.

Not quite the composed adult competence I’d imagined. Then again, when does adulthood ever deliver what it promised? 

Which brings me to this – there’s a specific lie adulthood tells you.

It’s subtle. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare and confetti saying WELCOME TO BEING GROWN UP. It’s way quieter than that. It’s in the way your teachers spoke about “your future” like it was a place with parking. It’s in the way older cousins, aunts and uncles asked what you wanted to be, as if you’d pick one thing, laminate it and carry it around for the rest of your life. 

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I used to think “having it figured out” was a destination. Like an airport. You’d arrive, collect your baggage, walk through the automatic doors and there it would be: stability, confidence, a neutral-coloured (or white even!) sofa you weren’t afraid to sit on. 

Page one: What you’re going to do with your life. 

Page two: How to stop overthinking literally everything. 

Page three: A simple recipe that uses lentils in a way that doesn’t feel like punishment.

Follow all of it and you’ll be fine. 

The mortgage will feel manageable instead of terrifying. 
You’ll know which wine goes with fish without secretly looking it up. 
Your wardrobe will contain actual matching sets rather than a collection of “this’ll do” pieces accumulated over fifteen years.
You’ll have opinions about curtain fabric. Strong ones. 
You’ll understand what savings and investments actually mean. 
You’ll stop googling “how to check if an egg is fresh” everytime you need to make an omlette.

And like the way they showed in the movies (and some books), there would be a moment, somewhere around your thirties probably, where you’d stand in your kitchen one fine morning, holding a mug and think, Ah. Yes. I have cracked it. This ‘being an adult’ thing is what I’ve wanted all along.

So here’s a spoiler alert: that spectacular moment never arrives. At least not in the form we think it will.

What arrives instead is a peculiar form of competent confusion.

Like being one of those swans you see on ponds – all serene elegance gliding across the surface while underneath, invisible to everyone else, your legs are going absolutely mental just trying to stay afloat.

You can handle a work crisis with aplomb, then spend twenty minutes in a supermarket paralysed by the sheer variety of olive oil options. Extra virgin? Light? Cold-pressed? What does “first pressing” even mean, and why does it matter for a Tuesday night pasta?

You give sensible advice to friends about their relationships (or parenting) whilst secretly wondering if you’re doing any of this right yourself. You own proper wine glasses but still drink coffee from that mug with a cartoon dog – yes, that one you bought in 2009 and can’t quite bring yourself to throw away.

And suddenly one evening, you’re standing in your actual kitchen, holding one of those mugs, watching the hot steam emerge in synchronised patterns from your nightly green tea and your brain goes:

Why does my back hurt when I breathe?
Is it normal to injure yourself while sleeping?
Why am I suddenly obsessed with pension calculators?
How many times can a person rethink their career before it becomes a hobby?
Am I meant to have a signature dish by now?

Or, like I said earlier, you’re on YouTube trying to figure out why your fridge has suddenly become possessed by a T-Rex.

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I suppose the reality is that most of us live in the gap between what adulthood promised and what it actually is. One that isn’t defined by the big cinematic moments, but by the little ones that illustrate how you’re evolving. Maturing, even.

The moment you realise you’ve become the person who checks the weather before making plans. The moment you can’t remember why you walked into a room and you just stand there, buffering, hoping the universe reloads. The moment you look at your parents and realise they are also just… people. Which is both tender and mildly terrifying, like finding a handwritten note in an old coat pocket and realising the handwriting is yours. 

What’s oddly comforting is how truly global this feeling is. Different cultures have different versions of “sorted” — marriage, money, stability, family, status, peace, abs — but the emotional experience is remarkably similar.  Maybe the same quiet panic when a younger colleague casually mentions they’re “pivoting” (PIVOT! — Ross, sweating on a staircase).

One friend recently confessed she’d been googling “is it normal to talk to your cat about your problems” at 2am. Another admitted to having a twenty-minute internal debate about whether tinned tomatoes count as one of your five-a-day. These are people who lead teams, make important decisions, give presentations to rooms full of strangers.

I reckon the best part of growing up is really the relief that comes with finally admitting that this whole “figured out” thing was nonsense from the start. That shared moment of “wait, you’re making it up as you go along too? Oh. Great. Same”. There’s genuine joy to be found in staying in rather than forcing yourself to events you don’t want to attend. In acknowledging that your ideal Friday night involves pyjamas and a good book rather than whatever you think you should be doing.  Or like discovering you’re not the only one who’s been faking confidence in your ability to keep houseplants alive.

Which is also why I’ve grown increasingly fond of JOMO — the joy of missing out — not as a trend, but as a survival tactic. I wrote about it before – letting go of the “By 30 you should have…” lists and celebrating the small wins instead: the misplaced keys, the missing lids, the weird body noises you now treat as background music.

Also, perhaps “having it figured out” isn’t a state. Maybe it’s a series of small, ordinary decisions made with slightly more honesty than fear. Maybe it’s admitting you don’t know and still moving anyway. 

And if you’re reading this while your phone quietly glows in the dark, with a search bar full of questions you’d rather not say out loud, you’re in excellent company. We’re all here. In our various time zones. In our various stages of pretending we’re fine.

So yes, there’s a specific lie adulthood tells you — that one day you’ll feel settled, stable, sorted.

The fridge, incidentally, still sounds like an injured (and really angry) dinosaur. But at least now I know that’s probably just the compressor needing a clean.
That’s progress, I guess.