The name of my blog is My Quarterlife Chaos. I had toyed with the words crisis and catastrophe also but realized that there is some beauty in the unknown so settled on the more neutral word, chaos. Let's face it, being in your twenties is a "bleeping" mess. No one ever warned me about this. There are no articles in my Shape, Self or Cosmo Magazines about surviving your twenties. No one in my life ever warned me about the mind games you can play on yourself in your twenties. Maybe once you look back on your twenties, you remember it in a more desirable light of being young and free, as what often happens with many other challenging years.
People warned me about being a teenager, they warned me about college, but no one warned me about the terrifying time between graduating and settling down into an "adult life". I have been told "I run" and "I hop" a lot. Many people don't understand how I can transition jobs or move around so often. The truth is I'm not scared of change. I'm more scared of feeling like my life can no longer change. That I'm stuck. That I can't move to a whole different kind of career or challenge.
When you are in your twenties you have no one telling you that you are doing the right thing. You finally have to trust your intuition alone and hope that everything will turn out alright and you will be able to continue paying your electricity bills. Sitting in a cubicle all day working on excel sheets can feel self-serving. How am I affecting the world? Am I using my talents? Is this my dream? What's my passion? How do I know that I'm going to be able to be successful in five or ten years based on the job I'm doing now?
I have had more meltdowns about my job, my location, what I want and what I need in the past 4 years than ever before. I spend 75% of the time trying to figure out what I want, and the other 25% defending my choices and actions to my family and friends.
Speaking to my interns this summer, I hear all about their woes of graduating college into a poor job market with no full-time job prospect. I feel for them, I really do. I remember graduating from college and having nothing. It was an AWFUL time. I had always relied on my grades, classes and friends to give me a baseline of success. After graduating Magna Cum Laude and having two amazing internships under my belt, I thought that after sending out at least 50 resumes a day, something would come along fast. This just wasn't the case and I felt completely worthless. I hated not knowing what was going to happen and felt so depressed sitting home trying to figure it out. I didn't receive my first job offer until August, which I immediately jumped on regardless of the smaller salary and hour and a half driving commute. Looking back, I see that last summer that I had off before entering the real-world as a beautiful time. It was a transition period. Things ended up working out, and they worked out FAST. I was way too hard on myself and should have relied and trusted in someone up there having a bigger plan for me.
I know that my words of advice and reassurance go into the new graduates' minds and out their ears as fast as I speak them. No one was able to comfort me then either.
Now, looking at them in this time of seasonal transition, it is interesting to reflect on my own feelings. In this time of change, I would hope that from my past experiences I could now handle it with a little bit more grace. Not every day is easy, and I can quickly fall back into the dark hole of not knowing what I'm doing with my life. I don't know the answers and I surely don't know the soothing words to try to calm me down. I try to focus on my husband and the pieces of my life that stay true, my family and friends. Hopefully I will not feel this way for the next 6 years, until I reach the big 3-0, but until I feel a little bit more settled and at peace, I will just try to sit back and have a little faith that everything will work out the way it is supposed to.
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