Hi,
My name is Patience Tom.
I'm 26 and am having a Quarter Life Crisis.
They say 40's is the new 30's, but I say 25 is the new 45. Ok so we don’t have bad comb overs but we have more bad hair days, we don’t drive round in flashy Beemers trying to pick up young pretty things but we wonder when we will ever make enough to do that. And though we don’t pretend to be 10 or 20yrs younger than we really are - we still wonder "who" we are, what we are going to do with our lives and have the best parts of it passed us by.
I am 26 and frustrated with where my life is going - often going to bed at night wondering if it’s going anywhere at all. They say we are Gen Y's (or Gen Y not’s) - The Options Generation. We are told we can have everything. Our parents worked their asses off so we can be spoilt brats, living at home till we're 30, picking and choosing jobs/ partners as if we were picking and choosing our shoes.
We are told we don’t want to get married, we don’t want commitment, we don’t want stability, we don’t want to be tied down. It's not cool to want these things. We want to be independent, in control (and as I write this the words of Kanye West/ Daft Punk come to mind) and most importantly we want to be harder, better, faster, stronger than the Gen X'ers before us. We're loud, proud, confident and have something to prove!
Under this illusion that I too can "pick and choose" anything, I have quit my (supposedly glamorous) job as a designer after 2 yrs.
Now with this economic crisis looming I must not forget that I "thrive on deadlines", "have a can-do attitude", "is passionate about making a difference" and will think work can also be "lots of fun".
I'm 26 and tired of being a "Go-Getter". I've travelled, seen the world, done the job-hopping, bar-hopping, bed-hopping thing, spent my entire months salary on a killer outfit with matching killer shoes and matching killer hangover. I've outsmarted and outdone those twice as experienced as me and looked into the eyes of those twice as old as me - half relishing the victory and half terrified of one day becoming that person.
To put it bluntly - I am burnt out.
For all my "success and achievement", hidden deep inside me is a haunting fear that this is as good as it gets.
What I really want to do with my life is become a primary school teacher but looking at the average paycheck compared to a designer’s paycheck, I would have to cut my lifestyle in half. Lets face it, for a 26yr old (even one with a QLC) your lifestyle is your life. Ironically if I hadn't been the go-getter that I believed I had to be, I would never have looked down from the top of the mountain and realised how far it is to slide back down.
So now what? I can’t talk to my parents cos they will just tell me how they spent days and night working in the fields just to have enough to eat, how lucky I am, how unappreciative I am, how I would never survive in their days with my attitude. I can’t tell my friends cos "there's no point sitting round moping" and "every problem has a solution"- I just need to be "creative" about it. I can’t tell my younger sister cos her generation is out to prove they are going to outdo my generation.
So here I am telling you my issues. Wow - I am writing a blog about my issues. If this isn’t a sign of the times then I don’t know what is.
P.S. You may wonder why I have titled my blog “How To Survive A Quarter Life Crisis” and not something like “Quarter Life Sux” but “positive thinking” has been embedded into me and so have rom-com happy endings.
