Becoming Yourself: Embracing Change in Your Twenties

Figuring Out Who You Are in Your Twenties

What does being yourself actually mean?

When I was younger and unsure how to handle a social situation, my parents would always say, “Just be yourself.” I don’t disagree with that advice—if people don’t like how you act normally, then they are not your friends. But what exactly defines the self? As a child, I thought I knew. Yet, whenever I tried to actually “be myself,” I ended up feeling even less like myself. I then realised that the only time I was ever authentically myself was not when I was trying to follow the script of authenticity. Instead it was when I was building dens in the living room and playing pretend with my sister or my friends. Whatever bout of creativity that came to me spontaneously, was often an expression of my authentic self.

Defining the Self in a World Obsessed with Labels

But what does this mean in your early twenties, when everything must have a label? We’re prepped and primed to begin categorising ourselves from the age of 18 years old. “You do realise that a gap year is not a time to sit around and do nothing,” the foreboding voice from my sixth form careers adviser told me. “If you’re unsure what to do during your year out, you should at least think about the option of university.” I was already finding sixth form quite difficult at the time and I tried my best to fight back the tears of frustration. I’ve come to realise recently that feeling like you’re not being heard, is often a symptom of someone not acknowledging who you really are. His haste at getting me to apply to university was motivated by the need to guide a student through uncertainty by defining her trajectory. However, retrospect has taught me that you gain a much better understanding of yourself and your trajectory when you learn to escape such definitions.

Identity is truly a fluid concept and a paradoxical one too. I am the image of my childhood, even though I do not recognise the person that I was just a year ago. How do we grapple with such a confusing perception of ourselves at an age that demands so much of us? Your early twenties are the years where you step into adulthood for the first time. Since you’re so fresh out of the water from your teenage years, where you were still very much under your parent’s control, your early twenties can feel nothing short of exhausting. You’re learning what it means to have fun on a night out with your friends whilst being responsible. You’re learning how to organise your day effectively to meet deadlines. You’re learning what a meaningful relationship looks like. You’re also learning what it means to earn your own money and perhaps travel on your own. It’s an era of change as well as trials and tribulations. In order to survive the rite of passage, you must have a constant and that constant finds itself in the understanding of oneself. But how do you understand yourself when identity is both fluid and paradoxical?

Childhood Clues: Remembering Who You’ve Always Been

It might sound strange, but you must observe yourself in those childhood moments when you were still uncontaminated by society’s expectations. These moments were often fleeting and hard to recall but they captured an unfiltered passion for something, free from hesitation. Yes, it is true to say that such passionate ambitions sometimes met their end quite quickly. Like the time I said I wanted to one day be a vet. I can now say with confidence that that has never been the career of my choice. Yet, I observe the other ideas that I’ve expressed with confidence and notice how some of them have stayed. I remember reading books as a child and telling my parents I wanted to be a writer. I still have quite a long way to go to achieve that aim to its fullest extent but the very fact that I have any intent to pursue the idea, suggests that the desire is a constant in my life. I also said how I wished to one day become a dancer. I’ve since realised how challenging a career in the performing arts can be. But again, the very fact that the love for dance remains constant shows that it is indeed another constant in my life.

Isn’t that funny? Somehow, we fail to see what is self-evident—what remains true in our lives since childhood become our binding constants. Perhaps the value of these constants is difficult to see. But all you must do is place yourself in the turbulent years of your early twenties and soon you’ll see the necessity of having a rock to cling onto.

Finding Ground in the Paradox of Change

However, I would also say that this is why this era is a paradoxical one. You find yourself both reaching out into the abyss of change and the unknown whilst also clinging onto the parts of yourself that have remained with you since childhood. In order to find your way through this passage, you need to embrace the beauty that exists in this imperfection. I love to dance and I love to write but equally, I love to try new things. The past few years have shown me that whilst I often seek comfort in solitude, I am capable of being the most extroverted person anyone has ever seen. I would never have thought that I would ever be a confident public speaker. Yet, I’ve been giving history tours of Cambridge University for the past three years now.

The truth of the matter is that we need to cherish what has remained constant in our lives because that’s what keeps us grounded. As I’ve said at the beginning, it is often difficult to define the self. Even though we won’t fully be able to understand ourselves, these constants ensure that we are not left empty in that uncertainty; that we have some integrity to fall back on when all else fails. Yet, it is only with this integrity that we can have the confidence to reach out, to extend the hand beyond that circle of comfort and to embrace the change that is inevitable.

Practicing Self-Awareness in Everyday Life

Of course, to accept this presupposition blindly would be to disregard self-awareness which is, in many ways, paramount. Self-awareness can be hard to obtain in a world where the self is hard to define. However, it comes from the mere observance of your natural inclinations and the analysis of how they serve you.

For instance, you may be naturally drawn to playing video games. You might observe that these video games allow you to do something fun in your free time and connect with friends at the same time. Or you might observe that whilst you enjoy playing video games, they’re preventing you from forming meaningful relationships in the real world. In a different example, you might find it enjoyable to exercise a lot. On the one hand, you might observe that this exercise has a positive impact on your physical and mental health. On the other hand, you might observe how it could potentially become harmful if it is rooted in negative body image or control issues. Now, neither of these natural inclinations are inherently bad. Gaming and doing exercise aren’t inherently counterproductive. But they are dependent on whether they grow with you or not. To be self-aware is to know when something is having a positive impact on your trajectory or a negative impact. You don’t necessarily have to abandon what you enjoy, but you might have to change your relationship with it depending on how it impacts you.

This principle extends beyond the confines of mere hobbies too. It can be applied to all facets of your life, including your relationships and your personality more generally. For instance, you might observe that you’re a naturally introverted person and more insular when it comes to social interactions. With regards to personality, there is no superiority complex when it comes to introversion and extroversion. Both have their benefits and both have their drawbacks and with this knowledge in mind, one can conclude that we need a good mixture of introverts and extroverts to make the world go around.

Yet, when it comes to introversion, the benefits are that you listen to what others are saying, you think deeply about all aspects of life and this causes you, in many ways, to have a high emotional intelligence. But perhaps the drawbacks are that you’re less socially expressive and less willing to grasp opportunities due to a lack of confidence in defining your ambitions to others. Out of all the factors mentioned, personality is one of the features of ourselves that will rarely shift from its position. Our personalities might be formed through nature or nurture but what remains certain is that we will always have our defaults. It’s not about dismissing how we naturally behave but about using it to our potential.

Of course, the benefits of introversion reap the easiest rewards in situations that are perfectly suited for introverts. But in the terrain best suited for extroverts, introverted traits don’t necessarily need to be abandoned but they must be used strategically to reap similar rewards. If you’re doing a presentation, for example, you might not have the same level of projection as an introvert compared to an extroverted person. Yet, you might have an acquired ability to connect with your audience due to your high emotional awareness. So yes, whilst personality is a constant, it has the ability to evolve with us in this era of constantly “becoming”.

For relationships, a similar principle can be applied. For romantic and platonic relationships, it’s highly important to observe how the people you build connections with move with you into the future. At one point in your life, you might develop a strong connection with a particular person but in the future, that relationship might no longer serve you. You can do one of two things: you can either change the meaning of the relationship so that it moves with you into the future or you can abandon the relationship if you feel it no longer has the potential to move forward. Neither course of action is wrong but we must return to the theory of binding constants and observe what remains stationary as we move through the course of our lives. We start to lose ourselves in our early twenties when we hold onto aspects of ourselves that no longer serve us.

Change Is Inevitable—Embrace It Consciously

Thus, the most important takeaway is to observe what remains as we change. However, in the same light it is also vitally important that we not only change but learn to embrace the change. Far too often, I see people my age drift or remain stagnant because they are too afraid to try something new and risk making mistakes. That behaviour can be very damaging in the sense that it promotes stagnation. When you no longer try to step out of your comfort zone, you don’t just become anchored to your constants, you become imprisoned by them.

In essence, when you stagnate you’re no longer on that journey of discovering what evolves with you and what doesn’t. In the end, you risk living with aspects of yourself that look like constants but really no longer serve you. As such, whilst the risk of making mistakes and failing at something are imminent, those mistakes and failures are what lead you down the road to obtaining a greater sense of clarity and with it, a greater sense of self.

If there is ever a time to embrace potential failure, your early twenties are the time for that. You can spend years in a job that you don’t like and still come out feeling youthful and free. In reality, if you feel you’re wasting time in a particular career in your early twenties, you’re really not wasting time at all. You’re going out there and gaining experience and when it is time to eventually move on, not only do you have a newfound wisdom but you still have time to exercise that wisdom.

Becoming Yourself: A Continuous Practice

What does being yourself actually mean? From childhood, I’ve definitely learnt that authenticity is not a script. If anything I’ve learnt that when we attempt to turn it into that, we turn into roleplaying actors who drift further away from their truest selves. In actuality, we must learn to not consider what we are and just be. Yet, in some ways, we must simultaneously learn to observe our actions and meditate on what they mean. We must learn to cast neither judgment nor admiration on what we do but see how what we do impacts our lives. Only when we have undergone such meditation, can we act on what we have observed.

As a result, we observe our hobbies, interests, personalities and relationships not to define ourselves rigidly, but to understand how we evolve through them. In doing so, we can recognise our default behaviours and the parts of ourselves that have always been there, while allowing space for new versions of ourselves to emerge. Those aspects of ourselves that do prove to be constant in our lives, are what guide us through the turbulent waters of the era of constantly becoming. They are not tools for stability because they are heavy anchors that chain us to the bottom of the sea. They are tools for stability because they remain with us as we continue to reach forward into the unknown. Sometimes, we must learn the art of self-awareness to know what constants are no longer serving us. We move closer to a sense of authenticity when he learn how to observe ourselves.

Being yourself isn’t a performance, and it isn’t a destination. The kinetic nature of our being implies that our identity is not curated by a fixed set of traits. It’s a practice of meditating, tuning into your behaviours and being willing to adapt. It’s in allowing yourself to take risks, learn from mistakes, and reimagine how your life could be.

In the end, to be yourself in your early twenties is not to have all the answers, but to stay curious about who you are becoming. And maybe that’s enough.