I Thought I’d Have This Figured Out By Now

Room One

I have been packing suitcases for most of my adult life, which you would think would have resulted in some measurable improvement in my ability to pack a suitcase.

You would be wrong.

Every trip begins with the same confidence. I know where I’m going. I know how many days I’ll be there. I own clothes. This should be straightforward. I put the suitcase on the bed convinced that experience has prepared me for this moment, and for approximately the first five minutes, everything goes remarkably well.

Then Future Me gets involved.

Future Me has plans. Apparently, she requires options. She may wake up one morning and reject every shirt I’ve worn willingly for the last several years. She could encounter unexpected weather. She might be invited somewhere requiring an outfit completely unrelated to anything on the itinerary. There is always the possibility that she’ll suddenly become the sort of person who needs three pairs of shoes for a four-day trip, and who am I to stand in the way of her personal growth?

So I begin adding things. An extra shirt because you never know. Another pair of pants because apparently pants emergencies are something I’m preparing for now. A hoodie despite traveling somewhere with a forecast that strongly suggests the hoodie will spend the entire trip folded neatly in the suitcase. Enough charging cables to establish a small electronics department. By the time I reach toiletries, I’m packing as though basic personal-care products will cease to exist the moment I leave home.

Eventually, I stand back and look at the bed. The suitcase is open. Clothes have spread beyond its borders and established settlements on nearby furniture. There is a pile of things I’m definitely taking, another pile of things I’m probably taking, and a third pile whose entire organizing principle appears to be “Let’s not make any decisions we’ll regret.”

I’ve done this before. Many times. That somehow doesn’t help.

There are an astonishing number of things I assumed I would understand by now simply because I’d been alive long enough. Packing is apparently one of them. Fitted sheets remain unnecessarily aggressive. I still don’t know how long you’re supposed to keep the box an electronic device came in, so the answer appears to be somewhere between six months and the collapse of civilization. Recipes that instruct me to “season to taste” continue to place far more confidence in me than the evidence supports.

For years, I assumed adulthood worked through some kind of gradual accumulation. You learned one thing, then another, and eventually enough information gathered in your head that you crossed an invisible threshold into being a Person Who Knew What They Were Doing. I kept waiting for that part, convinced there would eventually be a moment when everything clicked into place.

Not everything, obviously. I never expected to understand taxes without becoming irritated, and I’ve accepted that any piece of furniture requiring more than twelve assembly steps is testing the limits of our relationship. But I did think there would come a point when I would feel less like I was figuring things out as I went.

Instead, I’ve become increasingly convinced that most of us are figuring things out as we go and have simply gotten much better at doing it without looking alarmed. That realization should probably concern me more than it does, but mostly I find it comforting.

Eventually, I get everything into the suitcase. This requires removing several things Future Me had insisted were essential and reminding her that wherever we’re going probably has stores. I zip the suitcase closed, stand back, and admire my work.

Then I remember something I forgot to pack.

Maybe that’s adulthood too.

Room Two

I’ve spent a surprising amount of my adult life assuming there was information everyone else received that somehow never made it to me. There was probably a meeting. Maybe a handbook. At some point, all the other adults gathered in a conference room and learned how to pack exactly the right amount of clothing, understand insurance forms, fold a fitted sheet, and determine how much food to make when people are coming over for dinner. I was apparently out that day, probably trying to decide whether I needed another pair of shoes.

When I was younger, I imagined adulthood as a place you eventually arrived. I didn’t think about it consciously, but somewhere in my head there was a future version of me who knew things. She made decisions without circling them seventeen times first. She remembered why she had walked into a room. She knew whether the leftovers in the refrigerator were still good without conducting an investigation involving smell, mathematics, and a review of the week’s calendar. She packed for four days using exactly four days’ worth of clothing and never once stood over an open suitcase wondering whether this trip might finally be the occasion that required the shirt she hadn’t worn in three years.

The older I got, the farther that imaginary finish line moved. At twenty-five, I assumed thirty-five-year-old me would have things figured out. Thirty-five arrived and apparently hadn’t received the assignment, so I quietly transferred responsibility to forty-five. Surely by then I’d possess the calm certainty I’d always associated with people who seemed to know where they were going. Forty-five came and went, and eventually I began to suspect Future Me had been taking credit for a considerable amount of work she had no intention of doing. She had a remarkable reputation considering her actual performance.

I should give her some credit, though, because plenty of things did become easier. I learned how to make decisions I once found intimidating. I learned that mistakes usually aren’t nearly as permanent as they feel while you’re making them. I became much more comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” followed by, “Can you show me?” I’ve changed my mind when I’ve learned something new, asked questions I once might have been embarrassed to ask, and discovered that admitting you don’t understand something is considerably more useful than nodding thoughtfully while hoping nobody asks a follow-up question.

What never arrived was certainty, and for a while I found that mildly disappointing. I had been promised, admittedly by nobody in particular, that experience would eventually produce some kind of internal authority. Enough years plus enough mistakes plus enough life experience would equal a person who walked confidently into situations thinking, “Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing here.”

Instead, experience mostly taught me how many different ways there are to not know what you’re doing. There’s the ordinary “I’ve never done this before” variety. There’s the more advanced “I’ve done this many times and somehow today’s version has completely different rules.” There’s “I absolutely knew this once.” There’s “I know someone explained this to me, but apparently my brain marked that information as temporary.” And then there’s my personal favorite, “I have no idea, but everyone is looking at me, so we’re about to find out together.”

Oddly enough, that last one has served me pretty well. Every answer I’ve found seems to reveal another question sitting behind it, patiently waiting its turn. The more places I’ve gone, people I’ve met, conversations I’ve had, and things I’ve learned, the larger the world has become instead of smaller.

That wasn’t the deal I thought I was getting. I had expected adulthood to come with answers. Instead, it appears I’ve spent all these years getting better at questions, which probably explains why I can stand over a suitcase I’ve packed dozens of times and still ask myself whether I really need another hoodie.

For the record, Future Me always says yes.

Room Three

The more I thought about Future Me, the more exhausting she sounded.

This woman I’d been expecting to become wasn’t simply experienced. She was prepared for everything. She made the right decisions, anticipated what was coming, knew what she needed before she needed it, and apparently never arrived somewhere only to discover that the one thing she absolutely should have packed was sitting at home on the bathroom counter. That’s an unreasonable amount of responsibility to place on someone who doesn’t technically exist yet.

I’m not sure when I decided adulthood was supposed to work that way. Maybe it came from watching older people when I was young and assuming their confidence meant certainty. I saw the decisions they made but not all the questions that came before them. I saw people going to work, raising families, paying bills, making plans, fixing things, and generally moving through the world as though someone had explained the rules. It never occurred to me that some of them might have been thinking exactly what I sometimes think now: I have no idea, but everyone is looking at me, so we’re about to find out together.

The actual version of me has turned out to be considerably less efficient than the one I imagined, mostly because she gets curious. A conversation sends me looking something up. A sentence in a book leads to another book, which leads to an article, which leads to forty-five minutes disappearing while I learn something I had absolutely no intention of knowing that morning. I hear a piece of music and want to know who wrote it. I encounter an idea I don’t understand and start pulling at the thread. Occasionally this results in useful knowledge. Occasionally it results in knowing far more than any reasonable person needs to know about a subject that will never come up in conversation again. Either way, I like this version of me better, even if she takes considerably longer to finish things.

For a long time, I treated curiosity as something that belonged mostly to the beginning of life. Children ask why because the world is new. Students ask questions because they’re learning. Young adults experiment because they’re still deciding who they’re going to become. Somewhere beyond all of that, I imagined the questions would gradually settle down and experience would take over. Mine apparently missed that memo too.

If anything, I’ve become more curious as I’ve gotten older. Not because I know less than I used to, although there are mornings when searching for my glasses while they’re sitting on the table next to me makes a compelling argument. Every new thing I’ve learned has shown me how much more there is beyond it. Knowledge hasn’t made the world feel finished. It’s made it bigger, and that’s changed the way I think about getting older.

There was a time when I assumed becoming yourself meant gradually narrowing the possibilities. You figured out what you believed, what mattered to you, what you were good at, and where you belonged. You assembled enough pieces and eventually stepped back to admire the completed picture. The longer I live, though, the less I recognize myself in that idea.

I’ve changed my mind about things I once believed with absolute certainty. I’ve become interested in things I once walked right past. I’ve met people who made me reconsider assumptions I didn’t even realize I was carrying. I’ve discovered new parts of myself at ages when younger me probably assumed we’d be done discovering things and would instead be occupied with whatever she imagined fully formed adults did all day.

Apparently, we’re learning, changing, asking better questions, searching for glasses sitting right beside us, and packing an extra hoodie for weather that has given us absolutely no reason to believe we’ll need one. Maybe Future Me doesn’t need to have everything figured out after all.

Maybe she just needs a little room in the suitcase.

Room Four

Eventually, the suitcase and I reached an agreement.

I removed the extra hoodie, put it back in, removed it again, and finally left it on the bed. One pair of shoes was returned to the closet. Several shirts survived a last-minute review process that had no clearly established criteria. The charging cables remained because apparently that was where I drew the line.

Then I zipped the suitcase closed and left.

Somewhere between home and where I was going, I stopped thinking about whether I’d packed correctly. There were places to go, people to see, things to do, and whatever careful calculations I’d made while standing over the suitcase quickly became irrelevant.

I had forgotten something, of course.

Nothing dramatic. Just one of those things I’d been absolutely certain I wouldn’t forget, which is usually how forgetting works. I realized it, spent a few moments wondering how someone who had devoted that much time to packing could still manage to leave something behind, and then found another solution.

That was it.

No crisis. No ruined trip. No emergency intervention from Future Me. I figured it out and went on with the day.

Meanwhile, several things I’d packed with great conviction never left the suitcase. The shirt I might need stayed folded exactly where I’d put it. The extra pair of pants enjoyed a lovely trip without ever being asked to participate. At least one charging cable traveled hundreds of miles simply to experience a different electrical outlet from inside my luggage.

When I got home and unpacked, all those carefully considered possibilities came back out of the suitcase. Some went into the laundry. Some went directly back into the closet having accomplished nothing more than an unnecessary round trip. The charging cables returned to wherever charging cables gather when they’re not being packed for travel.

And the thing I’d forgotten?

I’d managed perfectly well without it.

A while later, another trip came around.

Once again, I put the suitcase on the bed and started making piles. Future Me immediately began lobbying for additional clothing options. I considered the hoodie despite a forecast that offered absolutely no support for its inclusion. I packed too many charging cables because apparently growth has limits.

But something was different.

I wasn’t trying quite so hard to pack for every possible version of what might happen.

I packed what I thought I’d need. I added one or two things I probably wouldn’t. I forgot something I probably shouldn’t have.

Then I zipped the suitcase closed.

The trip was waiting.

So I went.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.