Emerging Adulthood

Relevant to young adults in their 20s, Emerging Adulthood is a chat about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I reflect on my own 20's and the lessons I learnt when I discovered that the traditional university route just wasn't for me. Young adulthood is a time for curiosity, fun, and adventure, but most importantly, it's a time to discover what exactly it is that makes your life worth living and a time to carve out your own individual path towards a fulfilling future.

Transcript

Hi everyone,

Welcome back to my channel.

I'm Melissa.

This series is all about being curious and I thought I'd explain a little bit behind my why behind doing this.

What is the purpose of me showing up here with you sharing all this information?

I remember what it was like in my 20s in my early adulthood.

How confusing it felt,

How lost I felt actually,

How overwhelmed I felt like I was this big bad world out there and as much as I was super excited to get out there and live my life and explore things I was also,

Interestingly enough,

Paradoxically frozen in fear because I just didn't want to get things wrong.

There was so much pressure on me as I'm sure there is with you to go out in the world and you kind of need to know what it is you want or you need to know how you want your life to look.

There's a bit of a paradox here because if you saw in one of my segments I talk about getting clarity in what you want and I think the most important thing,

The one thing that I was missing in my 20s when I was navigating my early adulthood was knowing how I wanted my life to feel.

There's a difference between knowing how you want to feel and knowing what you want to achieve like having a goal.

For most of us we are expected to know what career we want,

What our life needs to look like and there is a pressure to commit to that image,

Commit to that goal.

So I think it's incredibly important to give yourself permission to continue to face life,

To embrace life with a lot of curiosity and a lot of play.

So even though you may wake up one morning and feel,

Yeah I want to do this and I want to feel this way,

I want to embody this feeling of excitement and joy and curiosity in life,

But it's okay to wake up the next week and for you to not want that anymore because it's all about going out there and experimenting,

Experiencing as many different things as possible so that you can get an idea as to what you relate to,

What resonates with you and what you'd like to continue to bring into your life.

We are accused more often than not in early adulthood that we're really fickle,

That we change our minds,

That we can't change our minds,

That we have to know.

Impossible.

It is impossible to know what you want because how are you meant to know what you want when you haven't done it yet?

We've got to do stuff so that we know whether or not it's a line for us or whether or not it's not a line for us.

So I'm going to give you a little bit of an example of what I went through in my early adult years.

So I went to boarding school in the UK,

I did my A levels,

That's around 17,

18 and I did the thing that was set out for me to do,

Right,

Which was choose a university,

Choose a course and go to university.

I never really had an opportunity to really think or feel whether that was something I actually wanted to do because that was the roadmap,

That is the roadmap that's pretty much set out for all of us in that age,

Whether it's you go to college or whatever.

So I had that lined up,

Didn't really think about it,

Went to university.

In my first term,

My first semester,

Totally hated it,

Wasn't interested,

Wasn't connected to the course and I was in a dilemma because it's like,

Oh my God,

I've got all these expectations to make,

My parents had paid these school fees,

I promised them and myself and all my other friends are doing courses,

Am I going to look like a failure,

Am I letting myself down,

Am I letting the whole world down?

You know what I did?

I just left university.

I stopped thinking about it and I followed my heart and my gut.

This is not me directing you on what to do,

It's just showing you how I led my life,

Which was really tuning into what felt right for me.

I've been asked to talk about mistakes made and wisdoms gained.

I truly don't believe in mistakes,

Okay?

A mistake is only something you make when you know the outcome.

When you know the outcome is going to cause harm and you do it anyway.

In this instance,

As I was leading my life,

Exploring my life,

Discovering my life,

There were no mistakes to be made because they were only adventures.

As I said earlier,

I never knew the outcome of any decision I was going to make until I made them.

So how could that possibly be a mistake?

All it was was an experience that I gained for myself.

If the outcome of a choice was painful,

If it caused suffering,

Then I knew that that choice would lead to suffering.

Not a mistake.

The mistake maybe might have been if I then continued to make the same choice over and over again,

Knowing that I was going to suffer.

So I dropped out of university,

Much to the disappointment and pain and struggle of my family and my parents,

And I decided to go straight to work.

Now I'm not going to minimize that experience because it was very painful,

It was really difficult.

You know,

I was like this rebel,

I actually had no clue what I was doing.

No clue.

It was a total unknown.

But what I did know was what I didn't want.

I'm going to say that again.

I didn't know what I did want,

But I did know what I didn't want.

And that was I didn't want to be in university.

So that's another way to kind of find a little bit of grounding and clarity for yourself is to be clear about what you don't want.

That's just as important as knowing what you do want.

Okay so what did that look like?

You know,

When I dropped out of university,

I won't lie to you,

It did feel a little bit like I was a failure,

Like I was the dropout because I did,

I dropped out.

All my other friends were at university,

They were having a great time,

They were learning all this stuff,

They were conforming,

They were obedient,

They were compliant,

They were doing what they were meant to do.

They were doing what was expected of them.

They were ticking all those boxes.

And where was Melissa?

Melissa wasn't doing any of those things.

What Melissa did do was she went out and she got a job.

And I worked as a,

I basically just took any job.

I ended up working in an office as a general dog's body,

Which basically means an office runner and I worked for a very small company,

But very,

Actually a company that had a lot of impact in the UK.

I was working in the UK at the time and they were the think tank for the Conservative Party.

So all my bosses,

It was a very small office,

Only five people,

But my bosses were all very mature people who were writing policies for government.

What an amazing environment to be working in my first job.

So on the outside,

It looked like,

Oh,

Melissa's dropped out of uni,

She's a dropout,

She's working this really crappy job as a runner.

But actually in reality,

I was out in the big wide world,

Surrounded by people who had lived and worked in the big wide world with so much experience.

And being in their company meant that I was learning so much about life from them.

At the time,

It was just exhilarating for me,

Just to be in somewhere new and really somewhere that I had no idea where it was going to lead me to.

I had no idea what I was going to learn and where I was going to be,

What place I was going to be put at every single day.

It was petrifying,

But at the same time,

It was exciting.

You know that kind of feeling when you're on a roller coaster,

You know,

You're coming up,

You're climbing up slowly and there's that whole anticipation,

You're reaching the peak and you're like,

Oh my God,

I'm so excited,

But I'm also petrified,

I'm so excited,

I'm so petrified.

You reach the top,

You reach the precipice of that ride.

And just at that moment of the unknown coming towards you,

There is great exhilaration.

And that's really what I'd love for all of you to feel is that on the other side of fear,

And you've probably heard this before,

On the other side of fear is limitless potential.

You get to expose yourself to all the infinite possibilities of life before you.

So fast forward a couple of years,

I think by the age of 21,

My friends all had an amazing time at uni.

They were done with their exams and they had graduated.

And by the time they had graduated from university or college,

I was working my second job.

I had been promoted and I had bought,

Or I was renting my first flat and owned my first car.

So whilst my friends had gone through university and had come out with huge student debts,

No job,

No clear knowing of where they were going or what to do with this amazing degree that they had,

I had a secure salary,

A secure position in an office.

I had my own property that I was living in and fully independent.

So what's the moral of the story,

Right?

Well,

Clearly it's okay not to know.

People expect you to know,

But the reality is no one knows.

I mean,

I'm the age that I am right now,

40 something,

That's like ancient.

And I still don't really know what's going to happen tomorrow or in the next moment because life is constantly unfolding,

Unraveling and full of surprises.

So the most important thing is stay curious.

If you don't know,

It's okay not to know.

The way to know is to just do something,

Is to put yourself out there,

Go out in the world and do stuff.

Do as many different things as possible until something sticks.

And if one thing doesn't stick,

Do something else.

And if something else doesn't stick,

Do something else.

And if you're bored of one group of people,

Move into another space.

Explore.

Life is your playground and it's your adventure.

Stay curious.

So thanks for being here with me again today.

Don't forget,

Leave me your comments below,

Leave me any of your questions.

And if anything was unclear,

Let me know so that I can explain things to you.

The most important thing is I'm here for you.

So if there's anything you'd like me to talk about,

Any suggestions for topics,

Drop them in the comments.

Until next time.

Bye.