My friends and I have a running joke where we describe certain people as “real people”: those who have jobs, houses, families, lives. Those who know what to say (and when to say it), how to dress, how to belong. Who lack all the awkwardness and somehow, feel at ease within their own skin. By that definition, I’m not a “real person” yet.

Likewise, I spent my teens idolizing my 20s yet simultaneously fearing them. I believed that your 20s were the beginning of the end — as if it were a cliff you are shoved off of, where all your whimsy and spontaneity and life drain away the moment you hit the ground, and you have no choice but to land a nine-to-five job and stay there forever. Yet that was okay, because once I hit 20, I would have it all figured out and somehow cross the threshold between who was “real” and who was not.

Yet, as I sit here, typing on my dusty laptop, shriveled up in fear of my own future, I am nothing but disappointed. My friend turned 21 about two weeks ago and it was only then that I began thinking of my own age and place in life, despite having been 21 since April. Somehow her birthday jolted me into realizing just how much time had passed, how much I’ve changed and how much I’ve stayed the same.

Where is the cool, composed persona I once imagined for myself at age 13? What happened to the meticulous life plan that I promised myself I’d make my first year of college? And why do I feel more childish than ever, despite being the oldest I’ve ever been?

I recently told my friend that the very first thing I had noticed about the rushees of her sorority was that they definitely had friends in high school. They seemed put together in a way I wished to be, lacking the awkwardness and hesitation that stubbornly clung onto me. I don’t know if this was coming out of bitterness and jealousy, a comment purely born out of my own insecurity, given that I had close to none, but I couldn’t help fixating on the disparity between us two: a towering gap between who I want to be, and who I am. How unwittingly lost I am in the very act of comparing myself to others. How pitiful it was to feel almost inferior to these girls years younger than me.

I keep measuring myself against these thresholds, almost searching for proof that I am behind. I think about the unfunny joke I told last week, the awkward silence between my classmate and I, the coffee chat I absolutely bombed. I think about how small and unfinished my life feels next to the people around me, how I want to leap straight to the end — the solution, the “realness” — without enduring the stages in between.

But I also think about how I would not be here if I hadn’t burst out crying in front of my roommate last week over post-grad plans. Or fallen down the Michigan League stairs and sprained my ankle for seven months (and counting). Or let go of someone I outgrew. Or lived every mistake, every jagged little moment that has woven itself into the formula of my being.

Georg Hegel’s theory of history rests on the idea that we move through stages, each one necessary for what comes after. Nothing can be skipped; we cannot step outside time. Every step carries traces of the past, folded into the present as it shapes the future. And maybe the same is true of living: We cannot truly move forward unless we feel — live — everything that lies before us. We have to move through these stages, feel them fully — the embarrassment, the jealousy, the fear — because each one lingers inside the next. Your 20s, then, are not about already being complete, but about collecting these fragments of experience and carrying them forward.

And so, I think about my “realness” as waves that come and go: a first credit card, a joke that lands, an outfit well-matched, a friend from long ago.