When Everyone Else Feels Ahead

Notes on uncertainty, ambition, and the quiet work of building a life.

The first thing everyone says after you graduate isn’t congratulations.

It’s the question, “what’s next?”

It seems simple enough, and I know the people asking mean no harm. But lately it feels like being handed a map where all the roads have been erased. I feel my chest get tight, palms start sweating, my cheeks turning red when I reply, “I’m still trying to figure that out.”, because that’s the honest truth. And I can feel the subtle shift in the room when I say that.

For the past couple of years, my life had structure. Syllabi, deadlines, final papers, my thesis, the quiet logic of semesters stacking into a degree. Even when things were difficult, there was always a next step. I knew exactly what I needed to do and how to accomplish this long standing goal of getting my undergraduate degree. Then suddenly, one day, the structure ends.

Now that said structure is gone, I’m realizing something strange, when the world stops telling you where to go, you have to decide whether that uncertainty is terrifying or a kind of freedom.

Usually, it’s both.

For most of our lives, the next step is obvious. Elementary school leads to middle school, which leads to high school, which leads to college, which can lead to a possible career, or more school, or settling down to start a family. But what happens when the structure ends? Or you aren’t sure which options feel like the right one for you? When there is no syllabus for adulthood? Is feeling lost actually a problem… or just the first honest moment of being grown up?

My path through college wasn’t exactly straightforward. For a long time, finishing at all felt uncertain.

When I first started, I was grieving the loss of my mom. I was trying to understand who I was supposed to become in a world that suddenly felt unfamiliar. I had moved back to my hometown, where memories seemed to live in every street corner. The past was everywhere. It was one event after another where I suddenly found myself even more traumatized and lost.

Then COVID happened, and though it was a beast of its own, it ended up being somewhat of a blessing in disguise for me. With the world stopping and everyone turning inwards, it gave me the space to stop my academic journey and start to really look at myself and heal parts of my life that I could no longer ignore.

Flash forward to 2023, something shifted. I found that I wanted to go back to school, and this time purely for myself, finding my purpose again. Classes started to light up parts of my brain that had been quiet for a long time. Writing began to feel like a way of thinking through the world rather than escaping it. I had found my value again, albeit through academic achievement and validation.

Eventually, almost unbelievably, I graduated. With honors.

There was a moment picking up my degree when everything felt surreal. For years I had quietly wondered if I would ever actually reach that point. I wondered if people would finally be proud of me, if they would see my value and what I bring to the table—what I’m truly capable of. And now that it was finally here, it felt that I couldn’t really take in this achievement, because then the existential dread came rolling in. Suddenly there was an expectation to flourish, when I couldn’t even answer the question I was asking myself: Now what am I going to do?

Since graduating, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at job boards.

If you’ve looked for work recently, you know the strange ecosystem that exists there. Listings that ask for three years of experience for “entry-level” roles. Application portals where you upload your resume, answer the same questions for the hundredth time, and click submit into what often feels like a digital void. There’s even a term now for positions that appear online but don’t really exist: ghost jobs.

After a while, the process starts to feel surreal. You can apply for dozens, sometimes hundreds, of roles without ever hearing back. Your resume passes through algorithms before a human ever sees it. You start wondering if you’re competing with other applicants, automated filters, or the invisible expectations of an economy that feels increasingly difficult to enter.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, doubt starts creeping in.

You begin to ask yourself quiet questions: Am I already behind? Was all of this just a big waste of time? Will I ever achieve the life I want?

This belief that I was falling behind, that I was late to my own life, especially when comparing myself to my peers, is not something new I was experiencing. It had just gone away while I was so honed in on my goal. But lately I’ve started wondering if that timeline was ever real in the first place.

There’s something misleading about the way we talk about progress. Social media compresses other people’s lives into highlight reels. Career paths appear linear when viewed from the outside. Success stories are told as neat narratives where each step leads logically to the next. Real life, of course, rarely works that way. Most people are improvising. They’re changing directions. Starting over. Figuring things out quietly behind the scenes. The difference is that uncertainty doesn’t photograph well.

I recently came across a visualization called Life in Weeks.

It maps the average human life as a grid of tiny boxes, each one representing a single week. At first glance, it’s unsettling. Seeing life condensed into such a small number of squares makes time feel incredibly fragile. But the longer I looked at it, the more comforting it became, because most of those boxes were empty. Yes, about a third of mine are already colored in. That’s terrifying. Makes you feel like most of your life has already been wasted. However, changing the perspective, and noticing (if god willing) all the time you have left, it gives a bit of hope. Given we use each moment wisely and stay present to the fact that we don’t want to waste the time we have left. Acknowledging the strange privilege of not knowing—that feeling lost can be the beginning of possibility, and that uncertainty itself means I still have the freedom to choose my path, even if that freedom feels frightening.

We spend so much time worrying about being behind that we forget how much of the story is still unwritten. We imagine life as a race with a clear starting line and finish line, when in reality it’s something much stranger and more open-ended. More like wandering through a landscape without a fixed route. Sometimes you move quickly. Sometimes you stop and rest. Sometimes you change direction entirely. But you’re still moving. This is where giving yourself grace within this journey of life becomes so important.

Right now, I don’t have the five-year plan people expect. I don’t know if graduate school is the right move yet, or more so, which program will fit the career I want. I don’t even know which career path will ultimately make sense or will be the right one for me. I don’t know how many applications it will take before the right opportunity finally appears.

What I do know is this:

The version of myself who began college years ago would hardly recognize the person I am now. Back then, I was simply trying to survive. Now, I’m trying to build something.

And building a life turns out to be very different from following a path. There is no single right direction, no correct answer waiting to be discovered if you just think hard enough. Instead, there are only choices, some small, some uncertain, that slowly begin to shape who you are becoming. Sometimes that means taking action even when you feel lost, even when you’re not sure the effort will lead anywhere. Sometimes the only way forward is simply to begin moving again.

Maybe that’s the real shift that happens after graduation. For the first time, the responsibility of building a life belongs entirely to you. Feeling lost isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re failing, even if it really, really feels like it sometimes. It may simply mean you’ve reached the first moment in your life where the path is truly your own.

Which is petrifying. But also, in a strange way, a kind of freedom. Because the privilege of uncertainty means possibility, our stories are still being written.

Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But perhaps it works the other way around as well: we must live in order to create the stories we will someday tell. For now, I’m still living my way into mine.