Turning 35, I don’t have answers but I have learned one thing: we’re all just winging it | Alexander Hurst

The millennial comedy Bref was a valuable introduction to life in France. More than a decade on, the show is back - and I've learned my own lessons

When I was little I imagined, as most children probably do, that the grownups had things all worked out and someday I would find myself on the other side of a clear boundary. Adolescence on one side; maturity, responsibility, self-assuredness, composition on the other.

A few weeks ago I turned 35. As the day ticked closer, I found that old childhood suspicion creeping in again; if any birthday should serve as a demarcator of that boundary, it should be this one, shouldn't it? And now, as the days tick further from that imagined inflection point, it has become a reinforcement of probably the single biggest lesson I have taken away from adulthood": that most of us are simply winging it most of the time, through a process of becoming that never quite reaches become.

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist