Finding Your Identity in Early Adulthood
In The Many Phases of Womanhood, I wrote about how the version of yourself that got you through one stage of life quietly stops fitting the next. This post goes deeper on the first phase most women move through as adults: figuring out who you are apart from your family of origin, often while still running on rules you never actually chose.
The rules you didn't choose
By the time you're technically an adult, you've already absorbed a lot of instructions about who you're allowed to be. Be easy to love. Don't take up too much space. Achieve, but don't seem like you're trying too hard. Keep the peace. Most of these rules were never spoken out loud. They were just the conditions for feeling safe and accepted in the family you grew up in, and you learned them the way you learn anything that young: by watching what got rewarded and what got you in trouble.
Early adulthood is when those inherited rules first collide with your own life. You're choosing a career, a place to live, maybe a partner, and some part of you is asking what you actually want, while another part is still quietly checking those choices against the old rulebook. That tension is normal. It's also exhausting when nobody names it, because it can feel less like "I'm building an identity" and more like "something is wrong with me for not knowing who I am yet."
What this looks like in the room
A lot of the women I work with in this phase come in describing something practical: a decision they can't make, a relationship that doesn't feel right but they can't say why, a job they're succeeding at but dreading. Underneath it is almost always the same question: is this what I want, or is this what I learned to want?
We spend real time on where the inherited rules came from, not to blame anyone, but because a rule you can name is a rule you can finally choose to keep or let go of. That's different from rebelling against your upbringing for its own sake. It's slower and more honest than that. You're not trying to become someone new. You're trying to find out who was already there underneath everything you learned to perform.
Why this phase deserves its own attention
It's tempting to treat early adulthood as a warm-up act, the phase before your "real" life starts. But the identity work you do here sets the pattern for how you'll relate to yourself in every phase after it. If you build your twenties around meeting everyone else's expectations, that pattern doesn't just disappear when you hit thirty. It follows you into the next phase, and the one after that, until something forces you to look at it directly.
Starting that work now, while you're still actively shaping your career, your relationships, and your sense of self, tends to be a lot less costly than starting it later. If you recognize yourself in this, I'd love to connect.
