I was shoved into this world naked, filthy and screaming. It got a bit better after that.

Pick a weekend, go to a big city. I don't know where you live, but I'm talking Chicago or Seattle etc something like that. Over the weekend, go to a few museums. Do the "tourist" thing. Find a college that looks interesting, and since you are 21, go to the local college bar on a Saturday and watch football games with the crowd. Either get a cheap hotel/motel room or sleep in your car if that is your thing. GO TO MUSEUMS, seriously. Find museums that look interesting and go there, spend as much time as you want or can and see if something there grabs you. Then go home. If you are within 4-5 hours of a big place gas will run you $100, a room overnight will run you $50-$80 if you stay on the outskirts and say $100-$200 for food and drinks. For under $400 if you are stingy you can go on an adventure and figure out what you want to do when you grow up.

If you need tips on saving money, ditch cable and get Netflix to save $1100 a year. Stop eating out so much and cook/prep at home. Make a list of wants and needs, and learn to know the difference between the two and how to balance them out. And get a skill, a trade, or something that needs to be done that people are willing to pay you for. In most fields, nobody cares about who you are what you look like or what you believe as long as you have some hustle, can do the work and don't make life hard for your coworkers. Passions are great and all, but if it looks like your passion (if you even have one) can't pay the bills, then get a skill that does pay and make you passion your hobby.

And not knowing what you want to do with your life at this age is fine. I'm more than twice your age and still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

You should check out #tripreport too. Good luck out there!

I moved to the big city and lived in a shitty crash pad in filth and squalor for next to nothing. Had tons of fun, learned a bunch about myself and the world.

I listened.

For a long time I thought I knew what I wanted and I shouted it at the top of my lungs. After that wore me ragged, I stopped telling people who I thought I was and just sat and listened. I think my family thought I burnt out, but deep inside I was alive as ever and I listened to everything and everyone.

One day, when someone spoke I felt compelled to reply. We started the first real conversation I had in years and they told me I should go talk to a friend of theirs. I listened there too, until I was compelled to speak and they told me to talk to someone else. I did this again and again for about a year and now I'm here and happy.

Edit: Sorry for the wall of text, but it's 6:30 AM and I work in about 9 hours so see y'all later

I was born in... relative wealth. At least, it would have been wealth if my father wasn't a manchild with no concept of a budget. And it kept getting worse from there. I attended my first funeral at 5 - did nothing but watch people cry about a man I didn't hear much good of and that I never even knew. Started having some responsibilities at 8 - mostly shielding my little sister of my dad (who at that point was a little bit more aggressive than a few years prior because his idiocy lead him to not being able to find a job again after about... 2002? AND with no backup money - because he thought he'd always have that huge salary. I won't go into details here) and doing what my dad wouldn't do - which was, often, to pick up stuff at the corner store and pretty much everything that involved Windows (because he was a fervent Linux-master-race kind of person) and networking (because, since he used to be a sysadmin, he refused to network the computers other than how he wanted it). Had my first nervous breakdown at 10 because my father kept force-shutting-down the computer (he didn't want me having a computer that young 'cause "computers are for grown-ups" - mind you, this was in 2004) without letting me save anything, and at that point the computer was all I had (no friends IRL 'cause I didn't trust people, and if I remember it right it was for good reason). I don't remember much between 10 and 17 really - I talked a bit more to people, but I felt like we were very little more than polite acquaintances because I didn't let them too close out of fear that they'd backstab me or compromise everything I worked to get to, socially. And then the hill went back down. I had to start working almost straight out of high school because we didn't make enough (by finishing high school, my parents lost what I gained them in child welfare money from the govt) to keep the (expensive) apartment (that my father picked while I was still in high school). Then my older sister (who, because of my dad, wasn't really in the family picture from about when I was... 6? to when I was 16) had a serious breakdown because of shitty relationships and of how afraid she saw our family's direction taking. Then one of the first good events I remember in the last few years - we moved apartments... without my father. THEN I started having narcolepsy - and discovered that pretty much none of the glands, in my body, that were pretty important for my continued life (thyroid, adrenal, gonads) stopped working BECAUSE the master gland (thalamus) stopped working, and the doctors were surprised I was even conscious, never mind walking. Then my mother almost died of pretty much the same thing (because she almost never left the house she had very little reason to go see a doctor until she couldn't stand because of blood loss because her body didn't produce the hormones to make her period stop that month). Then about a year later I almost lost consciousness because of a rotten tooth, and had to spend not-insignificant money to get it extracted (I still have another one to get extracted and about two to get fixed but can't afford it right now, at least they're not painful). And about a year later, I almost lost my mother again - this time because of heart issues that required a quadruple-bypass surgery (the doctors didn't understand how this happened, as the rest of her circulatory system was completely fine), AND my sister had another breakdown because of old wounds in the head (which mostly involved her feeling rejected from the family because she wasn't there most of the time). Oh, did I mention that in that time, my little sister had so many assholes fuck her up in school that she developed permanent anxiety towards school to the point of headaches and nausea? Which means that now that SHE is going to turn 18 (because I live with my mother and my sister - my mother didn't work because she never worked, and my sister because she was trying, despite her issues, to finish high school through adult school - I am the main source of revenue of the home right now), both my mother and my sister are desperately trying to find a job to cover the part of welfare that my little sister provided (then again, if she can't, she may try signing up for welfare even though it's not going to be much).

But hey, my 21st birthday was pretty okay, and I got a relatively steady job with possibilities of advancement and raises... but yeah, depending on when you define "start your journey", the answer is either "a tiny bit better than most", "bad", "very bad", "depressing and tiring" or "only still going 'cause I have something to lose".