At sixteen, there was a plan. Law school, the CLAT entrance exam, a straight and legible line into a career. The plan worked, in the narrow sense that it was executed — the exam was passed, the seat was won, the first year was completed. Then it was quit. The most confident, decisive version of this person, it turns out, was sixteen years old. Everything since has been improvisation, dressed up occasionally as strategy.
This piece is twenty short observations from the other side of that quitting — no credentials offered, no expertise claimed, just the ordinary evidence of having been alive and paying attention. Among them: that most adults are not more certain than you are, they are simply more practised at hiding it. That comparison is a habit worth actively unlearning. That the embarrassment of your future self is usually proof you grew, not proof you failed. That confidence is less about being right and more about being able to tolerate being wrong in public. That quitting law school wasn't a dead end — it was data.
There is a pulled-quote near the middle of the piece about growing up being mostly the slow work of figuring out which of your beliefs you actually chose, and which ones you simply inherited without checking. The essay closes by imagining the version of this person who stayed in law school — and then setting that version down gently, in favour of the one who is still here, still writing, still asking the questions out loud rather than settling them quietly.
Read the complete essay — all twenty thoughts — on Twenty & Thinking's original publication.