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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Alexander Hurst

Turning 35, I don’t have answers but I have learned one thing: we’re all just winging it

Laura Felpin and Kyan Khojandi in season one of the French comedy Bref.
Laura Felpin and Kyan Khojandi in season one of the French comedy Bref. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

When I was little I imagined, as most children probably do, that the grownups had things all worked out and someday I would find myself on the other side of a clear boundary. Adolescence on one side; maturity, responsibility, self-assuredness, composition on the other.

A few weeks ago I turned 35. As the day ticked closer, I found that old childhood suspicion creeping in again; if any birthday should serve as a demarcator of that boundary, it should be this one, shouldn’t it? And now, as the days tick further from that imagined inflection point, it has become a reinforcement of probably the single biggest lesson I have taken away from “adulthood”: that most of us are simply winging it most of the time, through a process of becoming that never quite reaches become.

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