Why “Finding Yourself” In Your 20s Is A Myth

As young girls, we are told over and over again that you’ll truly “find yourself” in your 20s. It’s the decade of self-discovery, of becoming who you’re meant to be — and after that, the story supposedly settles, as though the work is already behind you. But at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival earlier this month, one conversation quietly dismantled that idea. On stage, Brenda Appleton, Guosheng Chen, and Liz Hicklin offered a version of ageing that bore little resemblance to what we’re told. Their lives pointed to something far more complex — and satisfyingly unsettling to the cultural script - that becoming yourself is an ongoing process.

The notion of “finding yourself” young rarely exists in isolation. It comes with another expectation: that you should eventually stabilise, soften, or settle. And the idea of “ageing gracefully” is part of that same framework. It rewards women for becoming quieter, less demanding, less visible, and assumes that growth tapers off — that reinvention belongs to youth, and that later life is defined by acceptance or holding yourself back.

For Brenda Appleton, the idea of “finding” herself early was never an option. Growing up without the language to understand her identity as a transgender woman, she spent decades living a life shaped by expectation. She built a family, a career, a version of stability that made sense externally, even as it remained internally misaligned. In that context, youth certainly wasn’t a time of discovery. It wasn’t until later, after years of counselling, confronting fear and internalised transphobia, that she was able to move toward something more honest. She described her transition as an act of survival — a necessary shift toward living authentically. And yet, within that shift came a sense of clarity that had eluded her for decades. “It was the first time in my life that I felt like I was being truly genuine,” she said.

That same sense of becoming — something shaped across a lifetime — ran through Guosheng Chen’s story, though in a very different way. Her early life was marked by survival, as a teenager during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where she was separated from her family, sent to a rural village, and forced into physically demanding labour under harsh conditions. Later, she was detained and interrogated, which was an experience that pushed her to a breaking point. At one stage, she attempted to end her life. Instead, she survived, and made a decision that would follow her forward: “I could be crushed, but I would never be bent.” What followed was a continual process of rebuilding - shaping a life through experience, movement, and connection. She built a career, a community, and a life that stretched across countries and cultures. And later, after the death of her husband of more than 50 years, she faced another moment where her world could have narrowed.

Liz Hicklin’s story offers yet another version of that same disruption. Stepping into a new phase of creative life after realising there was another version of her that had been “sleeping for years”, she performed her first stand-up comedy show at the age of 93. That person — the bold, mischievous, and entirely uninterested in behaving woman sitting on stage — certainly didn’t emerge in her 20s. It surfaced later, after a life that had already held love, motherhood, and profound grief. On stage, she rejected the idea that ageing should bring restraint. In a closing poem, she summed it up simply: “I refuse to commit to my age… I’d much prefer to be naughty and wise.”

Across these stories, the idea of “finding yourself” begins to lose its fixed timeline. The focus shifts from a single decade to a lifetime that unfolds unevenly, shaped by what you survive, what you lose, what you choose, and what you are finally willing to release. What these women make clear is that selfhood is not something you complete early and carry forward unchanged. In fact, it can, and should be, interrupted, delayed, or reshaped.