the world is your playground! have fun!
Somewhere, someone decided life needed borders: timelines, five-year plans, appropriate age to begin, appropriate dreams to outgrow. Entire systems built by people no less frightened and confused than you are now; anxious people who needed their worlds to feel more legible and tangible, a way of coping with the fact that reality is neither.
This isn't pessimistic criticism, if you assumed it is. Consider it a reframing: If the rules are made up, you can simply construct different ones. Why do you need permission to become a changed version of yourself? To pursue something new, to leave, to begin again, to build a definition of success that nobody claps for, but you're finally breathing inside of? You get to decide what counts as a good day, good life, good enough reason to do something.
The rules you're living by right now — did you willingly choose them, or did you inherit them and forgot to ever question them? Are you running on someone else's operating system?
The whole world is your playground if you let it be. Yes, life can be cruel, abrupt, and endlessly unforgiving, but recognize you have far more authorship than you were taught to believe. The only rules that will matter are the ones you're willing to live by. Everything else is noise feigning certainty.