I am twelve. It’s my first school dance.
Usher’s “Yeah!” is blaring from the speakers, and I’m wearing Skechers, jeans, and purple braces. The dance ends at five, when our parents will arrive to pick us up.
I feel teenish. I am barely a teen.
Across the room, the only couple on the dance floor is slow dancing: the most popular girl in school and her boyfriend.
I am transfixed.
Her blond hair is perfectly straightened. Her low-rise Abercrombie jeans fit exactly the way jeans are apparently supposed to fit. Her white tank is effortless. The cutest boy in school has his hands resting lightly on her hips, and together they sway as Usher sings, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That’s the version of myself I imagine on my walk home from school, lugging heavy books by myself.
At twelve, growing up seems like an arrival. A place I’ll eventually reach where I’ll know all the answers. I’ll have the career, the guy, the right clothes, the perfect hair, the perfect slow dance.
I will know who I am.
Today, I’m thirty-four.
No more braces, but I still have that awkward smile, the one that feels like it’s still forming.
It’s nine on a Monday morning, and I’m sitting in my home office with freshly brewed coffee beside me. People are commuting, beginning team meetings, moving through calendars filled weeks in advance.
I’m in my thirties with only a rough sketch of tomorrow, let alone next year.
On my computer, I have a WordPress tab open. In another, a corporate job application. In another, an app I’m attempting to vibe-code into existence.
Three months ago, I left a multi-six-figure salary, healthcare benefits, and a steady career in sales.
Today, I’m figuring out my own health insurance, calculating runway the way I used to calculate commission checks, and applying for corporate jobs again.
And here I am, typing anyway.
The dilemma isn’t so different from the one I faced as a tween: being grown enough to understand how much more there is to grow. Carrying deep longings that haven’t yet been realized. Looking around at everyone else and wondering whether they received an instruction manual I somehow missed.
Only now, the questions are bigger.
Who am I going to work for?
Who am I going to be with?
What will my life look like six months from now?
I left my job because the gap between who I wanted to be when I was twelve and the woman I had become had turned into a chasm. I was scared that if I stayed much longer, I would no longer be able to close it.
The longing I’d carried for years was beginning to curdle into resentment.
Resentment for the life unlived.
For the missed connections.
For the days I went through the motions of success while privately feeling like a failure.
On paper, I was doing well. I was earning more money than my twelve-year-old self could have imagined. I had built a successful career. I had the perfect apartment. I was good at what I did.
But I was chronically disconnected from my own life.
I thought leaving would feel like freedom. Like self-discovery. Like the cloud-like lightness that comes after finally putting down something heavy.
And in some ways, it did.
But the freedom felt less like floating and more like free fall.
There was thrill. Lightness. Fear. Untetheredness. Uncertainty.
A typical day starts with relief. I wake up and remember that I no longer have the same obligations, the same calendar, the same motions to go through. At nine in the morning, I feel free.
By one, the day has carried on, and I’m still left with more questions than answers.
That’s when I begin to feel the weight of it all: the uncertainty, the decisions, the silence, the pressure to make this departure mean something.
By night, sometimes I feel peaceful.
Other nights, I go to bed at 8:30 just to quiet the loneliness of carrying so much of this alone.
I miss feeling like I belong somewhere. I miss being tethered to something. I miss knowing, with some degree of certainty, what is coming.
I do not miss going through the motions. I do not miss checking boxes that brought accomplishment without fulfillment. I do not miss the chronic feeling that I was living slightly outside of my own life.
When I was twelve, I wanted to be an author.
I imagined that writing would be a way to feel seen. A way to belong in a world that had never seemed entirely built for me. I wanted to move people through my words. I wanted to be published. Maybe even interviewed by Oprah.
Instead, I ended up in sales.
And in sales, I learned how words can influence, shape, and create new possibilities. I learned how to listen for the thing beneath the thing. I learned how to understand what someone wanted, what they feared, and what they needed to believe before they could move forward.
In a way, I did become someone who moved people through words.
Just not in the way I had imagined.
One year, I earned the kind of trip companies send you on when you win. I stood on a beautiful beach, surrounded by the evidence that I had succeeded, and I wept.
This, I think, is the tween phase of adulthood.
It’s watching your friends move into four-bedroom houses and have babies while you spend another evening on the couch swiping through dating apps.
It’s opening LinkedIn and seeing another promotion, another funding announcement, another person moving confidently up the corporate ladder while you are unemployed.
It’s having three tabs open on your computer: a corporate job application in one, a half-built app in another, and a newsletter you’re just beginning in the third.
It’s feeling too old to dream with the naïveté you once had, but not yet brave enough to take the full plunge into those dreams.
It’s looking at two kinds of people and wanting to be both.
There are the settled ones: the people with stability, partners, houses, routines, and a clear answer when someone asks what they do.
Then there are the bold ones: the twenty-one-year-old who just raised $9 million for her dating app, or the woman building a seven-figure company while traveling the world and somehow maintaining perfect hair and skin at all hours of the day.
I envy both groups for the same reason.
They seem to have figured it out.
They seem to have graduated from the braces stage of life and entered the era of smooth, perfect smiles, the kind that can only come, I imagine, when you finally have answers to the questions.
I am still waiting for the answers.
I’m writing because sitting alone in this version of tweenhood is heavy. It’s lonely. I need somewhere to put it.
More than that, I want to find the people who are living inside this same in-between.
Here, I want to explore what it means to become. To wear braces, metaphorically speaking, longer than you’d like. To live through that awkward phase of adulthood when it feels like you’re falling behind and carrying more questions than answers.
I don’t know where I’m going.
I don’t know who I’m going to be.
I don’t know what the next six months will look like.
But I’m willing to tell the truth about who I am becoming in the process: the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.
I am willing to write from the part of the journey that precedes arrival.
The beautiful thing about being twelve, I suppose, is that even amid all the awkwardness, you believe you have your entire life ahead of you.
There are so many blank spaces that you get to fill with your imagination.
For moments, even with the braces, you feel a deep sense of possibility. The kind that comes from being a little young, a lot inexperienced, and a whole lot naive.
At thirty-four, I still have a lot of life ahead of me.
Today, I’m choosing to lean into that.
Tomorrow, I may be scared again.
I thought adulthood would be the moment the awkwardness ended.
I’m starting to realize this is what becoming actually feels like.