There is a myth that is often told to graduates. Rounding off the years of hard studies, the late nights spent in libraries, and the rushed deadlines, graduates are told that there is a whole world out there available to them. Anything they could imagine doing, now is the time: your elusive twenties.

Now, they tell you, is the time to travel, to explore your interests, to live in a different country for a while. Now, they tell you, is the time to find a career path and a good job and start building a life. Now, they tell you, is the time to start accruing savings for the future, for the mortgage and the big wedding and the family.

Now, they tell you—and all at the same time. Don’t worry about your crippling student debt or the sparse job market for entry-level employees. Don’t worry about the unpaid internships or the lack of support for first time homeowners. But whatever you do, don’t waste your twenties.

The notion of freedom, especially for twenty-somethings, often comes with an assumption of expendable income to your name. Money can always be earned but when you’ve been working as a receptionist for a year in the name of being free, it’s hard to ignore the time passing you by.

For me, like many people, coming out of university was the first time I had any real kind of freedom over what would come next. Up until then, I had been following the instructions of the manual given to me by my parents, the step-by-step of schooling into higher education. There, the manual comes to a swift stop. I was left with a similar feeling to that of finishing building a piece of IKEA furniture only to find out I have three screws leftover.

I stared at the screws in my hand. One, an undergraduate degree in Linguistics. Two, a couple of writing credits to my name. Three, a love for film. What do I do with you now?

All the positive connotations I had with freedom were hard to acknowledge when they came with the impossible weight of the decisions that needed to be made. I needed limitations on my freedom to make it manageable. Thankfully, it turned out there were already more than I realized.

In her book, The Defining Decade, psychologist Meg Jay addresses the idea that twenty-somethings have to face the reality that the possibilities are not, in fact, endless. I was not starting life at age twenty-two, I already had twenty-two years of living behind me that had shaped parts of my personality, my motivations and my values. Whether consciously or not, I was already on a path. A path with many crossroads and branches yet to navigate but a path nonetheless. I had already bypassed the turning to be an astronaut. I was not going to be an astronaut (much to the disappointment of my five year old self).

Phew. One option down, a million more to go.

Finding freedom in the knowledge that I’ve already been walking a path longer than I realised.

I had to harness freedom in the way I needed it in my life. Freedom became about the next choice, rather than about all the choices. It became about choosing where I wanted to live or which direction I wanted to go in. The choices became more manageable.

More importantly, the freedom of choice allowed room for making the wrong choices once in a while. The wrong choices were an easy stepping stone to better things. Knowing what I want from life can be tricky. But knowing what I don’t want? Incredibly easy.

The freedom that graduating had opened up in my life became focused on finding the right turnings, the right path, that worked for me.

I hopped from contract job to contract job. I moved to Canada, ignoring the what if’s in favour of the simple truth: if I didn’t like it, I could move back home to the U.K. again, overstuffed backpack in hand. I quickly learned that the 9-5 lifestyle and headaches of office politics didn’t suit me. I found ways to work differently, to work from home, to work for myself.

At the start of this year, working full-time in a permanent job for the first time in my life, I acknowledged that by the end of the year, I wanted to be out of that lifestyle. This idea of working freelance full-time, to the extent of balancing work and life in the way I wanted to, had been bubbling for a while.

For a while, honestly, it didn’t seem feasible. It seemed like a pipe-dream to think that I could find some way to sustainably support myself while also facilitating a lifestyle that allowed me to travel when I wanted to travel or to spend a month visiting my family if I wanted to do so. The more I told myself it wasn’t realistic, the more evidence I stumbled upon of people doing exactly that.

By the start of the new year, I was sure this was something I could do. No matter what job I’ve been doing over the past few years, I have almost always had anywhere between one to three other freelance gigs going in the background. I had valuable skills, I had a scattering of contacts, and I had the ability to turn this into a viable career path.

So, end of the year—that was the goal. A year of stable, full-time work to build up some savings, to get through my immigration process to be able to stay in Canada as a permanent resident. That seemed smart.

You know what happened next. The world fell off its axis and my stable, full-time job was gone. I spent a month being truly unemployed. I watched all six seasons of Schitt’s Creek in a week. I played through the entire Uncharted series. And then I remembered that pile of projects I’d barely had time to touch all year in a haze of 40-hour weeks and remembering to eat and sleep on top of it.

Within a month or two, without necessarily meaning to, I’d started working in exactly the way that I’d planned to. I had found my kind of freedom.

My home office does 6pm beers on Fridays, how about yours?

Granted, the world is still an odd place. I will not yet be packing a bag to work off a beach in Fiji and my personal business model is nowhere near being sustainable yet. But almost without me putting much thought to it, it’s growing. Every time I finish a project, an offer of another one jets into my inbox.

The world didn’t give me time to second-guess this path. But, then, I wonder: was I already on it, anyway, and just couldn’t yet see where I was going?

Just How Free Do We Want To Be?