Navigating Discomfort at 23

discomfort, anxiety, feeling of being left out,

Timestamp: 2:41 PM, a rain-kissed Tuesday

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There’s a peculiar quietness to 2:41 PM on a rainy afternoon. The kind that feels like an ellipsis in time—everything paused, suspended between thunderclouds and half-forgotten to-do lists. I sit by the window, pretending the stillness is peace, though I know it’s something else entirely. It’s discomfort. That quiet but insistent ache that begins somewhere in the gut and blooms behind the eyes. The discomfort of being 23, of not knowing, of not being quite anything yet.

“I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.”
— Anna Freud

At 23, the world expects me to start becoming someone. But I wake up some days and feel more like a vapor than a body—there, but not quite shaped. Not quite solid. There’s a dissonance between what I thought this age would feel like and what it actually is. No epiphanies, no glittering clarity. Just the soft drone of anxiety in my chest, the invisible weight of all the things I’m not doing, not being.

I was told these years would be golden. That my twenties would bloom like springtime—full of adventure, friendships forged in firelight, spontaneous kisses in cities I barely knew how to pronounce. But instead, it often feels like I’m watching life through glass. I can see everyone else moving forward—falling in love, building things, becoming—while I linger in a kind of emotional waiting room.

“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes the discomfort is loud: spiraling over choices I haven’t made, deadlines I’ve missed, paths I didn’t take. But often, it’s quieter, more insidious. It’s in the moment I open Instagram and see another person from my school getting engaged, or that girl from the poetry club moving to a new country, or someone my age talking on a panel about the startup they founded. I stare, scroll, double-tap, and feel the heat of shame curl beneath my skin.

Why not me?

Why not yet?

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

There’s a hollow kind of grief in feeling left out—not just from events or parties, but from purpose. From connection. Even when surrounded by people, I often feel like I’m on the edge of the room, watching the intimacy bloom between others, unable to touch it.

Anxiety, for me, isn’t dramatic. It isn’t always panic attacks or tearful breakdowns. It’s more like white noise: always there, humming beneath the surface. It colors everything. Makes even joy feel fragile, like it might shatter if I exhale too sharply. It’s the hesitation before answering a call. The guilt after saying no. The paralysis that follows the question, “What’s your plan?”

And then, there’s the transition no one really prepares you for—the strange stretch of time between finishing your bachelor’s and stepping into your master’s. On paper, it sounds logical. A neat progression. But in practice? It feels more like a hollow hallway. You walk through it, uncertain, echoing with questions you don’t know how to answer.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
— Ernest Hemingway

Everyone claps when you say, “I’m doing my Master’s now,” but what they don’t see is the grief you carry for the version of yourself that was supposed to have it figured out by now. You’re technically progressing, yes. But emotionally, you’re in rewind and fast-forward at the same time. You watch your classmates get placed in companies, start internships, receive emails with offer letters you never got. And while you sip coffee in seminar rooms and annotate Eliot or Chaucer, a voice in your head whispers:
“You’re falling behind.”

“There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
— Nelson Mandela

It’s not that you don’t love your subject. You do. In fact, you love it enough to keep studying it when the world says, “Choose something safer.” But loving it doesn’t always mean it makes sense. It doesn’t pay your rent. It doesn’t always answer your relatives at weddings when they ask what your “plan” is. It doesn’t promise stability—just passion.

Transitions don’t arrive with fanfare. They creep up slowly, over months of quiet confusion. They feel like a hallway with all the doors slightly ajar, none of them clearly marked. And every day you walk past them, wondering if you missed your chance, if you should’ve knocked harder, if the door you did enter was the wrong one entirely.

“The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”
— Brené Brown

But transitions, I’m learning, are not meant to be clean. They are messy, and murky, and gloriously uncertain. They are the middle of the story—not the prologue, not the climax. Just that difficult, blurry chapter where the character hasn’t quite grown into themselves yet, but they’re getting there. One uncertain step at a time.

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Maybe the ache is not proof of failure, but of transformation. Maybe this shapelessness I feel is what becoming feels like—unglamorous, tender, slow. Maybe it’s okay that I don’t have it figured out. That some days, the only victory is making my bed or replying to that one text I’ve been avoiding for a week.

Discomfort stretches us. It points out what matters by refusing to let us ignore it. And I’m learning—slowly—that it’s okay to sit with it. To not try to fill the silence with productivity or affection or distractions disguised as ambition.

Because the truth is: I’m not behind. None of us are. There is no “catching up” in a life that is uniquely ours. The metrics they gave us—job titles, relationship milestones, curated timelines—are not the only measures of becoming. They are not the map. And we are not lost.

We are just… in the middle of it.

“And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?”
— Rumi

So if you, too, are 23 and aching—if you feel uncertain, unanchored, unfinished—I see you. I’m with you. We are walking through the same storm, even if our umbrellas are different shapes.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe this is the becoming.

Till next time, love— Mukta<3

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