In your 20s and 30s you’re making your mistakes, having your heart breaks, building your career, trying to figure it all out who you’re supposed to be, but what you’re really doing is gathering material, collecting experiences, learning lessons you’ll not understand until much later. When you’re young life feels like everything matters so desperately much, that job you didn’t get, that person who rejected you, that mistake you made last week, it all feels like the end of the world because when you’re young, you feel like every moment is defining you, that every choice is permanent, that every failure is a judgment on your worth as a human being. But here is what nobody tells you: all of that judgment, all of that urgency, is the raw ore of wisdom being mined, not the finished sculpture being judged.
What they don’t tell you and what you cannot hear until the noise of your own ambition quiets is that your 20s and 30s are not the exam, they are the syllabus.
You are not failing, you are gathering.
Every humiliation teaches you the precise weight of pride.
Every heartbreak carves out a new chamber in your chest, making you capable of holding a deeper love when it finally arrives.
That job you lost taught you resilience.
That person who left taught you about the kind of love you actually need, not just the kind you desperately wanted.
The urgency you feel in youth, the sense that every choice is a door slamming shut forever, is a trick of perspective. From the narrow vantage point of youth, a closed door looks like a wall. But as you age, you step back and see the whole mansion of your life. You realize those closed doors were actually guiding you, gently and sometimes violently, toward the rooms you were always meant to inhabit.
What feels like a permanent judgment on your worth is merely a draft. A sketch. Life is written in pencil for the first few decades. You get to erase. You get to trace over old lines with a steadier hand.
The person you are at 22 is not the person who suffers that failure. It is the person who receives an experience that will, years later, turn into compassion for another struggling soul.
So yes, feel it all. Let it matter desperately, because that desperate caring is the engine of a fully lived life.
But hold, deep in your bones, a secret whispered by every older person who looks at you with a knowing, melancholic smile:
None of this is the final verdict. You are simply collecting the soil from which your eventual self will grow.
And one day, you will look at the garden you’ve become, thorns and blooms alike, and you will not regret the storms. You will thank them for the rain.
Inspired by Alan Watts, expanded by Erik H Bush
To all creative youth, from me, to you. With love, EHB.