People can be capable, responsible and intelligent while still navigating uncertainty.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that.
The Myth of Fully Functioning Adults
When I was younger, I remember watching my parents with quiet admiration. They seemed to know what to do when things went wrong. Unexpected bills appeared, plans shifted, something broke or went sideways, and yet somehow they responded calmly, decisively, almost effortlessly. I assumed adulthood came with a kind of internal instruction manual. A calm voice in the head that simply said, “Do this next.”
I believed that one day I would have it too.
In between the melodrama of teenage life, I would occasionally think how reassuring it must be to reach adulthood. No more guessing. No more confusion. Just clarity, composure and answers to uncomfortable questions. Adults seemed to possess a quiet authority over life that teenagers were still negotiating with.
Years later I can admit, with some affection for my younger self, that this assumption was spectacularly incorrect.
Adulthood, as it turns out, does not arrive with a certificate of competence. No one hands you a toolkit of perfectly formed decisions. There are no bonus experience points for turning eighteen. The grand train labelled “Adult Equals Understanding” never actually pulls into the station.
Instead, you are left standing on the platform, suitcase in hand, realising that the journey ahead will require a fair amount of improvisation.
The Summer My Plan Collapsed
I learned this rather abruptly in the summer of 2014.
I had just finished my final school exams and was waiting for the results that would decide whether I could pursue the plan I had carefully constructed for myself. In my mind, everything was mapped out. I had received five conditional offers to study biomedical science at universities in the United Kingdom, with Lancaster as my firm choice and Liverpool as my insurance. At the same time, I had applied to several programmes in Lithuania as a practical backup plan. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery. I believed I had prepared for every possible outcome.
July arrived. Graduation came and went. Results followed shortly after.
To this day I still feel that I had somehow failed spectacularly, even though the grades themselves were respectable enough. They secured me places to study pharmacy and midwifery at a specialised medical university in Lithuania. On paper, it was a strong outcome. I even enrolled in midwifery as a safety measure while waiting to hear from the universities abroad.
Then August arrived, along with my nineteenth birthday and the final decisions from the UK. Both Lancaster and Liverpool rejected me. I had not met the conditions of my offers. Short and sweet.
It is difficult to describe how quickly certainty dissolves when a carefully constructed plan collapses. In the space of a few minutes I went from someone who believed she had the next chapter neatly arranged to someone staring at a blank page. Two days later I had a family event to attend. While everyone else was in the mood and getting ready to celebrate, I was in my room packing a small bag of dresses and quietly crying into a pillow, hoping the make-up artist would later perform minor miracles on my swollen eyelids.
When Plan B Became the Only Plan
In theory I still had a plan B in Lithuania. In reality, my reaction made something painfully clear. What I truly wanted was to study abroad. The disappointment revealed the truth more effectively than any calm reflection could have.
So I did what any highly rational adult with perfect clarity might do. I panicked slightly, applied through clearing, and somehow managed to secure a place on a Law and Politics course at Lancaster University.
From biomedical science to law and politics. Not the smoothest academic transition in human history, but law had always interested me and the opportunity felt too significant to ignore. If adulthood is meant to involve confident decision making, my version seemed to rely heavily on emotion, ambition and a moderate amount of stubbornness.
Law, Politics and a Mild Identity Crisis
I arrived in Lancaster determined to make it work.
The first year was educational in ways the prospectus had not mentioned. The language barrier hit me with the subtlety of a brick. Lectures moved quickly, legal terminology piled up and I often felt as though I was decoding a foreign dialect while everyone else had received the translation guide. Still, I persisted. My family might have raised a complainer, but they did not raise a quitter.
Somewhere in the background another question began quietly resurfacing.
What if I had stayed on the biomedical path?
What if midwifery had been the right choice?
What if the original plan had worked?
The mind is remarkably talented at generating alternative timelines.
The Law of Contracts Strikes Back
Then the summer of 2015 arrived and with it another small plot twist. My exam results revealed that I had failed the Law of Contracts. Not narrowly. Properly. The kind of failure that requires a resit if one wishes to continue.
For a moment I stopped running forward and actually paused.
Where was the clarity that adulthood had supposedly promised? Where was the confident instinct that told me exactly what to do next? If this invisible manual existed, mine had clearly been misplaced somewhere between immigration paperwork and lecture notes.
After a few days of honest reflection, I made another decision. I would change direction again and return to the biomedical path that had first inspired me.
Another round of clearing followed.
Eventually I was accepted onto a biomedical science programme in Liverpool.
Decisions Made Somewhere Between Panic and Hope
Looking back now, none of these decisions were perfectly calculated. They were a mixture of hope, persistence and educated guesses. At the time it often felt like stumbling forward through a fog while pretending to others that everything was under control.
And that, I have slowly realised, is far closer to the real experience of adulthood.
People are capable. People are responsible. People make decisions, build careers, raise families and solve problems every day. But behind that competence sits a quieter truth. Much of life is navigated without full certainty.
Plans are revised. Paths change. Confidence is often constructed while moving.
The Strange Comfort of Not Knowing
The reassuring illusion of adults who always know what they are doing begins to fade once you join their ranks. Strangely, that discovery is not depressing. It is liberating.
It means mistakes are not evidence of failure but part of the process of figuring things out. It means changing direction is not weakness but adjustment. It means that starting again does not erase progress.
More importantly, it reminds us that uncertainty is shared.
The people around us are not operating from some secret reservoir of perfect knowledge. They are navigating decisions, just as we are, using experience, instinct and a hopeful guess that the next step might be the right one.
A Small Administrative Oversight
And just in case anyone still believes adulthood comes with flawless administrative skills, let me offer one final confession.
When I accepted my place in Lancaster through clearing, I never actually unenrolled from the midwifery programme in Lithuania. Apparently in my rush to become an independent, highly functioning adult, informing the university of my change of plans slipped my mind entirely.
For several months I remained officially enrolled as a student who simply never appeared.
Emails arrived first. Polite ones. Then slightly more concerned ones asking whether I intended to attend lectures at any point. Eventually the phone calls began. I imagine the administrative staff were trying to determine whether their mysteriously absent student had been swallowed by the earth.
By November 2014 they solved the mystery the only way they reasonably could.
They expelled me for non-attendance.
Which, when you think about it, is a wonderfully fitting end to the story. While I was busy trying to become an adult who had everything under control, another university quietly concluded that I was the most unreliable midwifery student they had ever never met.
How is that for responsible adulthood?
Perhaps the real lesson is this.
Growing up is not the moment you suddenly understand everything. It is the moment you realise no one does.
The train you expected never arrives. The certainty you assumed adults possessed turns out to be mostly good posture and educated guesses.
And yet people still build lives. They choose directions, change course, start again, and keep moving forward.
Not because they finally know exactly what they are doing.
But because at some point they stop waiting on the platform and simply board whatever train happens to be passing.
Sincerely, G-