At some point in your twenties — maybe earlier, maybe later — you have a quiet, disorienting realization. The adults who raised you, the ones who seemed so certain, so authoritative, so in possession of answers to questions you hadn’t even thought to ask yet — you realize that they were guessing.
The whole time!
The confidence was a performance. The certainty was assembled in real time from incomplete information, genuine fear, and the very human need to appear like one knows what they’re doing in front of people who are counting on them.
They were winging it. The same way you are winging it right now.
This is either terrifying or deeply comforting depending on where you are in life. It should mostly be the second one.
The Script They Were Given
Your parents inherited a script, too. It came from their parents, shaped by the specific pressures of their era — a different economy, different expectations, different fears. The script said, “work hard, marry well, have children, provide, endure, and pray.”
It had clear instructions for the visible parts of life and no instructions whatsoever for the not-too-obvious parts.
1. How to process grief.
2. How to communicate needs.
3. How to raise emotionally healthy children when nobody raised you to understand what emotional health was.
They followed the script as far as it went. Then they improvised. And they never told you they were improvising because the whole point of the parental performance is to appear like you have a plan.
The Gap Between the Performance and the Reality
This is what you didn’t see as a child: the 2 am conversations between your parents about money that was gone. The career decisions they made, not from certainty, but from fear of the alternative. The parenting choices they made were because that was how they were parented and they didn’t know another way and hadn’t yet done the work to find an alternative.
The confidence you saw was real in its commitment. It was not real in its certainty. They were doing their best with what they had and who they were and what they knew. Which is, it turns out, exactly what you are doing.
Your Generation’s Specific Improvisation
You inherited a different world. One that moved faster than any script could account for, with different economic conditions, different social pressures, a global information environment that your parents’ generation didn’t have to navigate. You are making decisions in a context that has no direct precedent and very limited guidance.
The comparison you feel — the sense that other people your age have it figured out, that your parents had it more together at your age — is almost entirely false. They didn’t. The ones who seem to know have done their own invisible work to get here. The performance of certainty is generational.
“Nobody arrives at adulthood with a working map. The map gets drawn in the walking. You are not behind. You are exactly where this process puts people.”
You’re not lost. You’re early in an improvisation that will eventually, gradually, start to feel like a life. The script ran out for everyone at some point. What comes after the script is the real story. Yours is still being written. Keep going.
