the loneliness in your twenties

i cannot swallow failures anymore: an essay

sometimes i’m seated in the center of my friend circle, mid-laughter, when a thought intrudes with disquieting precision: would i have been more productive if i had stayed home? it’s irrational, i know—but it feels entirely plausible. what kind of life is this, where delight mutates into guilt and stillness masquerades as failure? how are we expected to endure this relentless pendulum—this oscillation between performance and presence, between ambition and exhaustion, between chasing futures we’re not even certain we desire?

the loneliness of your twenties is not a sharp scream—it is a sustained, subterranean hum. it reverberates quietly beneath your days. it keeps you company in bustling cafés, among familiar faces, even as you feel profoundly unmoored. it follows you into bed, slipping into the void beside you where intimacy or direction might have belonged. it whispers questions you cannot yet articulate.

are you adequate? are you seen? are you merely delaying the ineluctable truth that you’re falling behind?

we persist. you and i. we fill the hours with ritual and noise, playlists and half-formed plans. but some nights, the silence returns with more gravity than sound, and all we can do is sit in its presence, resisting the undertow.

failure is a bitter taste that doesn’t fade. i can’t swallow it the way i used to. it lingers. it settles in my chest, dense and unmoving, like a breath i never got to release. one rejection used to sting and dissolve. now it burrows into my bones. now it distorts the way i perceive myself. and the worst part isn’t just that something didn’t go right—it’s that somewhere along the way, i begin to believe i didn’t go right. that maybe i’m fundamentally inadequate. that maybe i was never destined to succeed. that the world is correct to look past me. and no one prepares you for that kind of grief—the grief not of losing something tangible, but of failing to become the person you once believed you might be.

everywhere, people are ascending. someone is being discovered, publishing their debut, launching empires, amassing followers, accolades, relevance. and then there’s me—watching numbers stay static, interpreting silence as verdict. wondering if my stillness is failure disguised as patience.

i carry the weight of this business like it’s my personal atonement, like it must thrive because i owe it to every past version of me who wasn’t chosen. who didn’t fit. who never quite arrived.

and i carry more.

i carry the weight of my lineage—the sacrifices of my parents, the quiet burden of their dreams deferred. the longing for a life that exceeds theirs but does not betray it. i carry the spectral outlines of past love, the ones who believed in the brilliance i now question. and most days, this weight isn’t cinematic—it’s paralyzing. i feel conscripted into a version of adulthood that requires me to drag both origin and aspiration with me, unsure where one ends and the other begins.

no one tells you how to mourn a dream that quietly expires inside you. or how to console yourself when effort and outcome refuse to shake hands.

sometimes i sit across from my parents, their eyes luminous with unsaid faith, and i nod, offering half-truths about momentum and clarity. they say, “you’ll figure it out,” and i want to fold into their belief. most days, i wear the mask of “i’m okay” like it’s stitched into me, like it’s something expected. i pretend i have purpose, pretend i have work to do. the hours stretch and collapse—a strange pull between too little time and too much of it. and some days, i feel like a charlatan. like i’m impersonating someone who still has conviction.

you just don’t feel like explaining yourself anymore. not to strangers, not to people who ask out of politeness but don’t really want the answer. it doesn’t seem worth it if it’s not hurting anyone. but then you get home and you sit with it too long, replaying the conversations in your head until they fray at the edges. you start overthinking until even you forget what the question was to begin with.

coffee feels like home. like something i can count on in a world that keeps shifting beneath me. when the days blur or feel too jagged, when the noise becomes unbearable or the silence cavernous, coffee is still there. it’s not just caffeine—it’s ritual. the warmth of the mug, the way it settles into my palms, the grounding of that first sip. it’s comfort. it’s rhythm. a pocket of stillness. it doesn’t ask questions. doesn’t require answers. i can sit by the window, sip slowly, and feel like for those few minutes, i belong—even if it’s just to myself. and maybe that’s what i’m craving most these days. not applause. not recognition. just something constant. something kind. something mine.

dating feels like a role i never asked to play but somehow got cast in. it’s rarely about connection anymore—it’s about performance. poise. trying to seem engaging enough while muting the parts of yourself that might unnerve someone. i catch myself curating stories, softening truths, reshaping old grief into humor just to feel easier to love. and it’s depleting. like i’m marketing a version of myself that doesn’t even exist in this apartment.

i don’t want to be someone’s project, or placeholder, or hopeful reconstruction. i don’t want to sell myself just for someone else to like me. that’s the worst kind of betrayal, the kind you commit against your own self. i don’t want to diminish myself just to be selected. i want to be seen, in totality—unvarnished, unedited. i want someone to witness the turbulence and not flinch. i’m done auditioning for affection. i want to be fully myself and still be sufficient.

there’s this pervasive dogma in your twenties that you must already be crystallized. you must know who you are, what you value, how to monetize your passion, where you stand on everything. you are expected to sculpt a legacy while still learning how to inhabit your own skin.

respect, somehow, is never about effort. it’s about age. as though wrinkles are credentials, and grey hair a prerequisite for being heard. i’ve never quite understood that. how people dismiss your ideas, your energy, your questions—simply because you haven’t existed long enough in their eyes. as if wisdom only counts when it’s been performed, documented, and archived. you try to speak and they call you naive. inexperienced. i don’t know when we decided that the number of years lived should outweigh the intensity of them. and you—you can be breaking your back, overextending yourself, proving your merit, and still it won’t be enough.

who wrote these rules? who determined that youth disqualifies insight?

i’ve never craved fame. never longed for the chaos of recognition. the idea of my name becoming ambient noise unsettles me. i don’t want to be everywhere. i want to matter somewhere. to someone. i want to be remembered by the people who knew my silences and still stayed. i want to be regarded as sincere. not exceptional. not prodigious. just sincere. the kind of presence that leaves something quieter than applause—comfort, perhaps. resonance.

ironically, i’ve always gravitated toward professions that demand visibility. writing. entrepreneurship. these are loud crafts. they require attention, demand achievement. and yet, the thought of being too visible makes me retreat. so lately, i’ve been reshaping what success means to me. not erasing ambition, just rerouting it. maybe it’s not about being known by thousands. maybe it’s about being remembered deeply by a few. maybe success is about truth over traction. i could write a hundred more books, build a hundred more businesses—but will they mean anything? that’s the question that won’t leave me alone. what is the point of all this striving if it doesn’t nourish something honest? not just for others, but for me. not just publicly, but privately, inwardly. and some days, i don’t know.

some days, i simply keep going, hoping that meaning doesn’t always arrive at the start. sometimes it finds you in the middle, when you’re too exhausted to look.some days i have no answer. only motion. only hope that meaning catches up once you’re deep in the act of becoming.

i want to be real. i want the things i make to be real.

not engineered for applause. not manicured to dazzle. but earnest. vulnerable. the emotional equivalent of a well-worn garment—threadbare in places, but deeply loved. i don’t want to create things that impress. i want to create things that inhabit.

to be young and feel ancient is a dissonance. your body still flexible, your soul already fatigued. some days time sprints, unkind and unrelenting. others, it drips slow, sodden with longing. and somewhere between velocity and inertia, we try to make meaning.

we show up. we recalibrate. we attempt softness in a world that weaponizes hardness. we hold onto wonder, even when it feels ridiculous.

yes, we spiral. we fracture. we ruminate. but that too is part of it. the bewilderment. the ache. the continual reassembly. we are floundering, yes, but we are also adapting. learning the choreography of survival. learning to breathe through the unknown. we are formidable. more than we allow ourselves to admit. we are tenacious, even in our weariness. and though we may not have every answer yet—we will. in our own time. in our own strange, irreverent, luminous way.

and we will chart our own course through life. maybe not seamlessly. maybe not symphonically. but truthfully. wholly. and entirely on our own terms.

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