Your Twenties Aren't for Figuring It Out. They're for Changing Your Mind.

Caroline Huckeba
10 hours ago
3 min read

My curiosity does not care about calendars or timelines. It will happily consume everything. I want to make every mistake, explore every passion, not as hobbies but as their own brief lives. I want to sketch futures that feel urgent and fleeting, where every possibility feels like the real one in the moment it arrives.

I want to work in corporate marketing. I want to travel to France to study civil law. I want to study computer science. I want to write a screenplay and see it produced. I want to dance competitively for months, quit, and begin a non-fiction manuscript. I want to work in publishing, then leave it for behavioural therapy. I want to study behavioural therapy, then move towards play therapy, then return to editorial work. Now I want to study clinical psychology.

This is not an abstraction. It is my timeline from 2023 to now.

The mind loves beginnings; the first page, the first week of believing you have finally found your thing. Beginnings are generous. They make you feel chosen. The middle is slower. Less cinematic. Less forgiving.

A person with multiple passions can feel too expansive to fit into a single sentence. Résumés prefer linear stories. They flatten multiplicity into something legible.

The curse of being a "master of none" is not unseriousness. It is not a lack of talent. It is excess desire and limited time. It is the knowledge of how many lives can be lived, and the grief of knowing you will not live them all.

There is a way to keep that desire from eating you alive.

Rather than choosing one thing forever, I can choose one thing for now.

One thing can matter more than the rest without erasing the others.

I am learning how to stay in the middle, the part where nothing is new anymore, where effort becomes invisible, where progress stops feeling like revelation and starts feeling like repetition.

Lately, I have been in the middle with writing. I have struggled with inspiration. I recently wrote about recovering from my eating disorder and lost followers across my platforms. I started questioning whether my writing is aversive, whether honesty itself pushes people away.

My writing has always moved towards discomfort, trying to make it something we can laugh with and learn to empathise through: menopause, periods, UTIs, grief, sex, bodies in their unpolished reality. But maybe I had been circling those subjects conceptually. When I wrote directly about recovery, without distance, I was not met with applause. I wondered if people do not want to see struggle when it is not aestheticised. If witnessing it is simply too uncomfortable.

And this is where the change actually happens.

Doing it badly and doing it again and again, maybe offending some people with disordered ideas about eating along the way, because recovery writing is not always palatable, and I am no longer interested in pretending it is.

Progress is slow and often invisible. You can work and still feel like nothing is changing. Writing is no longer new and shiny. I am not a novice, but I am not yet a master. I am learning to accept that I will lose people, maybe say it wrong before I ever say it right, but stay with it long enough to learn how to say it at all.

Infinity is too large for a nervous system. Boundaries give effort form. I cannot decide who I will be forever, but I can decide who I will be next.

Threads still require a loom. A "master of none" is only a curse if you never stay anywhere long enough to build. Mastery does not require a straight line. It requires a return.