Nobody told me I'd still be becoming someone at 30

I thought the figuring-out part was supposed to be over by now.

There is a version of your thirties that gets sold to you quietly, over years.

By the time you get there, the script goes, you’ll have the career sorted. The values settled. The important friendships thinned down to the ones that actually fit. The messy, uncertain figuring-out part that defined your twenties will be behind you.

You’ll feel, in some quiet way, like you’ve arrived.

I turn 32 this year. And I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at anything.

Not in a frightening way. More like the way you wait for a room to feel familiar after you’ve moved into it. You expect it to stop surprising you eventually. And then one morning you notice something you hadn’t seen before, and you realise the room is still showing you things.

What caught me off guard was how much leaving my corporate job accelerated this feeling. I stepped out of eight years of structure expecting, on some level, to find a finished version of myself waiting on the other side. Someone who knew what she was building and why. Someone who’d done the becoming and was ready to just be.

Instead I found someone very much mid-sentence.

The career had been doing more identity work than I’d realised. Not just the job title, though that was part of it. But the whole apparatus around it. The certainty of knowing what Monday looked like. The ease of answering “so what do you do?” without having to think. The particular confidence of being someone who was good at something, and having that be enough.

Without it, I had to look at what was actually underneath. And what I found was someone still forming. Still revising her opinions. Still changing her mind about things she’d been sure of two years ago. Still, at 32, very much becoming.

The version of me I was at 25 wouldn’t recognise several things I care about now. My relationship to work. What I think success means. The kinds of mornings I want to have. That feels obvious when I say it, but I had genuinely expected it to stop being true. I thought becoming had a finishing line. That you crossed it somewhere in your late twenties, caught your breath, and then just maintained from there.

You don’t.

I’d always assumed that people who seemed settled in themselves had figured something out that I hadn’t yet. Some clarity arrived at through enough experience, enough good decisions, enough years. I thought I was behind. I’m learning that what I mistook for clarity was mostly just people getting more comfortable sitting with the uncertainty. Not having fewer questions. Just minding them less.

I’ve been reading Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, and she talks about how identity doesn’t change through reflection alone. We don’t think our way to a new version of ourselves. We act our way there. We try things, take on new projects, inhabit new roles in a provisional way, and the identity follows the action rather than preceding it. You become the writer by writing. Not by waiting until you feel like one. I really like this approach to life.

I’m considered a Type B, especially when it comes to how I travel. I lean into spontaneity. Because I feel like when we travel, we’re discovering layers of ourselves that are yet to be uncovered. But that’s a story for another time! Gosh, I love how writing ignites one idea on top of another.

I found that both reassuring and terrifying in equal measure.

Reassuring because it takes the pressure off knowing. I don’t have to have it figured out before I start. I can write this newsletter before I feel like a writer. I can build my brands before I feel like a founder. I can call myself someone building a different kind of life before that life fully exists yet. The doing is the becoming. I’m allowed to act my way forward into the version of myself that’s still forming. And honestly, that’s the best way to learn.

In the same breath, it’s terrifying because it means the becoming doesn’t stop. Not at 30. Not 31. Not 40. Not ever, really. You’re always somewhere in the middle of a version of yourself you haven’t finished yet. Always in that slightly uncomfortable stretch between who you’ve been and who you’re growing into.

Nobody told me that part.

Or maybe they did, and I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was too busy wearing comfortable costumes — the corporate role, the reliable title, the tidy LinkedIn headline — to notice the parts of me still forming underneath.

Which is exactly why I keep going back to Japan.

There’s something I keep noticing there that I haven’t found a better word for yet. A quality in the older craftspeople, the ones who have spent decades mastering one thing. They don’t look like people who’ve figured it out. They look like people who have gotten very good at being where they are. In the work. In the day. In this particular version of themselves at this particular moment in their lives. Not finished. Just present.

I think what I mistook for arriving was actually just that. Presence. The willingness to be in the version of yourself that exists right now, without waiting for a more complete one to show up first.

I’m not there yet. I still catch myself wanting a cleaner answer. A neater way of explaining what I’m building and who I’m becoming. A sentence that makes it all sound more intentional than it sometimes feels.

But I’m getting more comfortable with the incompleteness. With the fact that the rooms are still showing me things. With the possibility that being 32 and full of questions isn’t a sign that I’m behind. It might just be a sign that I’m paying closer attention than I used to.

I thought the figuring-out part was supposed to be over by now.

I’m starting to think it might just be getting more interesting.

Still becoming. I think that’s exactly right.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

Katie xx