Sometimes I think I was raised on a different planet. Not because I believe I am different from everyone else, but because there are moments when I look around and wonder if everyone attended a class about life that I somehow missed. I’m in my twenties, yet sometimes I feel like I arrived late to a world that had already started without me. Everyone seems to know the rules, the expectations, the language of adulthood, the things you’re supposed to become. And I’m still standing here wondering who I am supposed to be. Maybe I wasn’t held back. Maybe I just graduated later than everyone else. But when you feel like the last person to finish, you start wondering whether something is wrong with you.
There are things I thought being a man meant that I have slowly watched disappear into the distance. Strength? Responsibility? Protection? Loyalty? Being someone who could be counted on? Maybe some of those ideas were naïve, and maybe growing up means learning that being a man is more complicated than the version you imagined as a boy. But what hurts is being expected to become something you don’t recognize while simultaneously being told that who you naturally are isn’t enough. It becomes exhausting trying to satisfy an endless list before anyone decides you’re worthy of being seen. Sometimes I wonder, Why me? Why does everything feel like something I have to earn? Did I do something wrong, or is this simply the burden I was given to carry?
Perhaps the hardest part isn’t even being overlooked. It’s being valued for what you can provide rather than for the person you are. If it isn’t your work, it’s what you can do. If it isn’t what you can do, it’s what you can bring into someone’s life. And somewhere underneath all of that is a person quietly asking, “Does anyone actually want me, or only what I can offer?” That question can hollow you out. You start wondering whether your presence has value without your productivity. Whether someone would still call your name if you had nothing to give. And then there is the strange contradiction of being missed only after you leave. Suddenly your absence proves your worth, but your boundaries make you the difficult one. You are wanted when you walk away, but when you say no, somehow you become the bad guy. How do you make peace with that?
Maybe I’m not a latecomer after all. Maybe I’m simply still becoming. Perhaps the world doesn’t hand us a timetable for discovering ourselves, even though it constantly makes us feel as though we’re behind. Maybe I don’t have to know exactly who I am in my twenties. Maybe I am allowed to question the things I was taught, to outgrow expectations, to discover that some of what I thought a man had to be was never mine to carry. I am allowed to become without having every answer first. And perhaps being unseen today doesn’t mean I am invisible forever. Maybe my worth was never supposed to depend on how useful I could become to someone else. Maybe I existed before I became productive, before I became successful, before I became someone’s partner, someone’s employee, someone’s provider. I existed before the world had anything to measure. And maybe that’s where I need to begin again: not with proving that I am worthy of being seen, but with remembering that I was never required to earn the right to exist.
A question to carry with you:
How much of who you are have you built for yourself, and how much have you built simply to be accepted by the people around you?
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