Aging & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

Youth has a way of mistaking other people’s composure for certainty. Dunmore’s line punctures that illusion with a quiet, devastating reversal: the insecurity you think is uniquely yours is, in fact, the ambient weather of adulthood. The sentence works because it’s built on understatement. No dramatic confession, no therapeutic flourish. Just “don’t always realise” and “full of doubts” - ordinary words that land like a private diagnosis.

As a poet, Dunmore is attuned to the social performance of confidence: the teacher who sounds authoritative, the parent who seems to know what’s coming next, the friend who gives advice as if life is a solvable equation. The subtext is that what looks like certainty is often discipline, not conviction: people learn to keep moving while carrying unsteady thoughts. “Everybody” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s democratic, even consoling, but also faintly bleak - doubt isn’t an exception, it’s the norm. That universality reframes adolescence: the young aren’t simply inexperienced; they’re also, in a way, misinformed about how the world actually runs.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century sensibility where public life rewards confidence, but private life is saturated with anxiety. Dunmore’s intent isn’t to romanticize doubt; it’s to grant it legitimacy. The line offers a mature mercy: you’re not failing at being human when you’re uncertain - you’re finally noticing what everyone else has been hiding in plain sight.