Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. They are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud.

A spotty résumé that used to reflect twentysomething freedom suddenly seems suspect and embarrassing.

those who are underemployed for as little as nine months tend to be more depressed and less motivated than their peers—than even their unemployed peers.

Not knowing what you want to do with your life—or not at least having some ideas about what to do next—is a defense against that terror. It is a reluctance to admit that the possibilities are not endless. It is a way of pretending there is nothing you can do to improve your situation. It is a resistance against accepting that there are no right

She imagined that people at work either had confidence or they didn’t, so any little thing that went wrong on the job suggested she didn’t. Rather than missteps, her mistakes became statements about who she was. Instead of being seen as feedback about what she needed to learn or about where she was in her career—the beginning—every reprimand

Feeling better, then, doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood. It comes from investing in adulthood.

Many of these things are incompatible and, as research is just starting to show, simply harder to do all at the same time in our thirties.

When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what therapists call “borrowing an ego.” She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we toss our distress like a hot potato too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own.

memento vivi—