The Version of You at Twenty-Two Wasn't Wrong

It is easy to look back at what felt like your purpose at twenty-two and either laugh at it or feel a little embarrassed, as though it were a phase you have since corrected.

Neither reaction is quite fair to the version of you that had it. Purpose is not a fixed destination you are gradually getting closer to with age, where every earlier version was simply a less accurate draft. It develops across a life in stages, shaped by whatever was actually available and true at the time, and there is no single correct route that the twenty-two-year-old version of you failed to find.

The version of you at twenty-two was not a rough draft of the current one. It was a complete answer to a question you were asking back then.

What usually changes is not that the old purpose was wrong, but that a transition came along and asked a new question. A move, an ending, a birth, a diagnosis, any of the moments that interrupt a routine long enough to force a look around. These transitions do not damage an old sense of direction so much as they open a door that had not previously been there to walk through.

None of this requires abandoning where you started. It just means the twenty-two-year-old version of you was answering a question that was actually being asked at the time, honestly, with the information available. That is a reasonable thing to have been doing. It still is.