Solimeo Studio

I left home at twenty-three with a plan. A vivid goal in mind.

Travel. Live. Be free.

It was structured. Measurable. Ambitious, but realistic. I knew what I wanted to build and more importantly, I knew why I was leaving. There was comfort in that certainty. Movement felt purposeful. Every sacrifice had direction.

And for the most part, I did what I said I would.

Goals were met. Milestones ticked off. Independence earned the hard way. I became capable in ways that would have intimidated the twenty-three-year-old version of me. I proved something to myself, mostly.

But now I’m twenty-nine.

And the clarity that once drove everything has dissolved.

There’s something destabilising about reaching the destination you once longed for and realising it doesn’t answer the next question. Achievement is strangely quiet once it arrives. It doesn’t rearrange your life the way you imagined. It simply settles into the background, waiting for new instruction.

The difficulty isn’t failure. It’s the absence of a new map.

In your mid-to-late twenties, people assume you’re building upward- consolidating, specializing, narrowing. Instead, I feel like I’m standing at another edge. Not unhappy. Not unsuccessful. Just unsure.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in this phase. You can’t blame inexperience anymore. You’ve done the brave thing. You’ve moved countries. You’ve built independence. You’ve proven you can survive discomfort. The narrative of “starting out” no longer applies.

So what now?

There’s pressure at twenty-nine to be strategic. To leverage what you’ve built. To turn experience into status, stability, clarity. But sometimes growth isn’t linear. Sometimes it plateaus before it pivots.

The uncomfortable truth is that achievement doesn’t eliminate uncertainty- it often exposes it. Once you’ve proven you can follow a plan, you’re left with the harder task of deciding what actually matters next.

Without the urgency of escape or ambition driving you forward, you’re forced into a quieter confrontation: what do I want now?

Not what looked impressive at twenty-three.
Not what justified leaving home.
But what feels aligned at twenty-nine.

This stage is less cinematic. There’s no dramatic departure. No visible reinvention. Just the slow, internal work of recalibration.

Maybe this is adulthood- not certainty, but the willingness to begin again without the adrenaline of proving yourself.

At twenty-three, I left because I knew exactly what I wanted.

At twenty-nine, I’m learning to sit with not knowing.

And perhaps that, too, is a kind of growth.

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