Your twenties aren’t a deadline. They’re a first draft.

A first draft is supposed to be wrong in places. Treating your twenties as a deadline makes every wrong turn feel permanent and every year feel behind schedule, when almost nobody is writing the final version that early. People change careers, move countries and start over at forty, and the world keeps failing to end.

Take the pressure off the timeline and put it on the drafting. Try things that might not work, because that is what a draft is for. Judge a chapter by what it taught you rather than by whether it could be published.