In the middle of a very public romantic collapse, a woman on Twitter said something that altered my brain chemistry. The situation was familiar. A man and a woman had loved each other, then stopped, and then one of them decided to bring the matter before the court of public opinion. I do not correctly recollect the event, but I think the man struck first. He laid out his evidence, and Twitter gathered. All was going a bit well till the woman responded with a voice note – a feature which has long been removed from Twitter – and the very first thing she said was, “I’m not even about to start with the fact that as a 24-year-old guy, you did not know what the fuck you wanted to do with your life.”
That one sentence was enough. The man’s carefully assembled case dissolved on contact. Whatever he had said about her, whatever was the subject of the public brawl, was forgotten. A lot of people felt that line on his behalf, probably because they were in his shoes. That sentence became so big that Fola, the Justin Bieber for nail technicians, used it in the intro of his song ‘Eko’.
I turned 23 on 21 May 2026. And that sentence has not left me since then. It is not because I have a sympathetic instinct toward the man. I do not know him, and his decision to drag a private grief onto a public timeline suggests a character I would find exhausting in person. That sentence clung to me like a wrapper to a waist for the same reason it was powerful enough to shift the focus of the spat; the categories are quite transferable. She was not speaking to me. She has no idea I exist. Yet the sentence seemed addressed to me because I also do not know what I want to do with my life. And I’m scared.
The fear this produces is more than the fear of death. Death has the good grace to be final. It is a full stop. It carries, in its very absoluteness, a certain dignity. This is a more adhesive fear; the suspicion that one is running late to an appointment whose time and location one was never given, toward a version of oneself that has grown impatient in the waiting room.
I should say, in fairness to myself, that by the conventional ledger I am not delinquent. I have finished my first degree. I am awaiting my service year. I occupy, in the technical sense, that suspended grammatical state between what I have been and what I shall become, floating in the comma between two clauses of a sentence whose second half is yet unwritten. I am told this is common, natural. I find the information largely unhelpful, in the way that knowing grief is common does not make grief any lighter, or knowing the dentist’s drill is routine does not make one’s jaw more enthusiastic about receiving it.
Though the condition is common, the experience of it is, each time, entirely private. The universe, it seems, manufactures this particular flavour of not-knowing in bulk, then presents each portion as custom-made. As if it sat down one afternoon with a specific cruelty in mind and produced, just for you, this bespoke package of unlived potential.
Every job that relates to what I studied requires NYSC as a condition of entry. This means that the door marked ‘career’ is currently locked, and the key is the service year, which has not started. This would be tolerable if it were simply a matter of time. But then you discover that you were supposed to have gotten a skill alongside your degree. A practical thing. Something your hands could do, or your computer, or both. Everyone else appears to have received this memo. It was passed around at some point, and you were not in the room. So now you are here, degree obtained, service year pending, skill conspicuously absent, and the question of what you are actually building toward hangs in the air like a magician’s hat.
I was in this confusing condition on my birthday, and it disturbed me greatly that at exactly 6.00am, I did what any sensible man in my shoes would have done. I texted a mutual on Twitter who seemed to have something going for himself. I had read his timeline carefully enough to form a settled opinion of him and his career. The two exchanges I had with him left me with the impression that he was moving, and that he knew in which direction to go. I asked what he was doing at 23.
We were not friends. The question was, by any ordinary social measure, slightly too intimate for our relationship. But he must have understood what was going on, because he answered graciously. He said he had been in school. He didn’t even have a degree. I breathed well for the first time since midnight. I’ll explain why. What I had done was find one person who, at my current age, had also not yet arrived anywhere. I used that fact to console myself. The entire architecture of my relief rested on the fact that when he was my age, a man I respected was in an even worse situation than I am.
We are more easily soothed than we like to admit. The bar for reassurance, when we are frightened enough, drops to astonishing depths. Still, I had it. The reassurance. I revelled in it till one of my dimwitted friends texted me.
“Welcome to your Jordan year.”
I knew exactly what this meant. Michael Jordan was a spectacular basketball player. He is basically the Michael Jackson of basketball. He wore the number 23. This number is, therefore, in the loose theology of pop culture, his number. The greeting was warm and ordinary, but I didn’t receive it as such. Apparently, I was in no mood to leave things alone that morning, so I googled it. I looked up what Michael Jordan was doing at 23. And I found that in a single playoff game, at the age I woke up to that morning, Michael Jordan scored 63 points against the Boston Celtics, the finest assembly of basketball excellence at the time. He played with such ferocious and sustained brilliance that Larry Bird, a man not given to exaggerated expressions, said afterwards that it was God disguised as Michael Jordan.
I sat with this for a long time. And I asked myself if I will ever be that good at anything at all. I am not, by any fair reckoning, without gifts. I can do several things with genuine competence. I am reasonably intelligent. I write well enough that people occasionally volunteer this information without prompt. I can hold a conversation and keep it interesting. I love literature and language with a maddening passion. But there is nothing I have done yet that will leave a witness changed. No performance that will cause anyone to use theological language for its description. I could not find the equivalent entry in my own life.
I know, of course, that Jordan is not a standard by which any sane person ought to measure themselves. He is not a standard at all. He is an outlier so extreme that his existence is less an inspiration than a category error, proof that certain human beings are operating under conditions the rest of us are not subject to. But the comparison was never really about Jordan. The question underneath is a question about capacity. About whether the thing that makes a man genuinely, undeniably excellent at something is distributed evenly and I simply have not yet located mine, or whether it is distributed the way most good things are, which is to say unequally, and some people simply do not receive the full (or any) portion. I know the answer, but I’ll pretend otherwise.
Here is what, underneath it all, I think the fear is actually about: It is about something I call the threshold. It is about the specific discomfort of standing outside the rooms of your life and discovering that the threshold is not the brief, uncomfortable moment between two rooms, but it can be, in fact, a room of its own.
I think what made the strange woman’s sentence land the way it did is that in the man she was describing, we saw a version of the thing we were most afraid of becoming. There is nothing as horrible as stasis dressed in the ordinary clothes of daily life, indistinguishable from living until someone who truly sees you tells you. I do not ever want to get to that point. This is, at 23, perhaps the clearest thing I know about myself.
But I have also come to understand that not wanting a thing is not the same as doing the work that prevents it. Dread, held long enough without action, becomes its own kind of residence. You can live in it. People do. They confuse the intensity of the feeling for the substance of a life, and years pass, and the corridor remains a corridor, and one day someone tells them what everyone else had already noticed.
I am 23. I do not know what I want. I do not yet have the thing I am exceptionally good at, or if I do, I have not found it, which, from where I am standing, amounts to the same problem. I am in the threshold room, with no furniture and excellent acoustics, and a Jordan year stretching out ahead.
And I have begun to suspect that the terror of this room is not that it has no exit. It is that it is comfortable enough to stay in, that a man can mistake his vertigo for a point of view, his suspension for a sensibility, and furnish the corridor so carefully that he stops noticing that the corridor was never meant to be lived in. My inability to find the door is a smaller fear than my not wanting to.
*Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash