During my burnout year last year I really didn’t do much. I spent a lot of time watching TV (and before then, I hardly ever watched TV). I sat on my sofa and re-watched the entirety of GIRLS on HBO. All six seasons, religiously. For that period of time, it was my new job.
I was twenty-one when the show first aired in 2012, living with my best friend in a flat in Stoke Newington, single and right at the start of my career. I had everything ahead of me. As much as I do prefer being the age I am now (34 and with an established career, financial security and a house/happy marriage), I felt an intense tug of grief for that period of my life. I felt really, really sad to let go of my younger self. That show absolutely represented my twenties, and I even wrote a ‘goodbye letter’ to the show for Glamour magazine in 2017 — and interviewed the creator and star Lena Dunham for my former podcast Ctrl Alt Delete.
I was feeling deeply reflective and wanted to go back there for a day or a week. I wanted to be twenty-two again. I wanted to sit on my terrace eating a katsu curry with my flatmate bitching about my boss and having no real problems (apart from being in my overdraft). I missed my fresh face, easy hangovers, the late nights, parties, warehouses, dates, the feeling of having your whole entire life ahead of you. That feeling of being invincible.
I felt too young to be having a mid-life crisis, but too old to be having a “quarter-life crisis”. The idea of the quarter-life crisis resonated more though — your first crisis that rears its head when you are moving away from your youth and thinking: so, is this my life now? Is this the life that I was looking forward to? And because I don’t plan to have kids, I was faced with a future without a conventional ‘plan’.
I really enjoyed a piece in
recently called The “Quarter-Life Crisis” — crowdsourcing stories from the community on the topic of having a crisis during your mid to late 20s. The piece mentions this New York Times article about Gen Z who are apparently already worrying about ageing (in their 20s!) and ‘preserving their youth’. I don't want to mock any young person who is already claiming they’re ‘old’ because I do believe that everyone, whatever their age, is allowed to worry about these things. Especially women! Anti-aging creams are targeted at all of us. I think you must let yourself grieve, and then you move on.I like the re-branding of any crisis as an ‘opportunity’ or ‘reflection’. I wanted to welcome a guest writer to tackle this topic for us. How do we move through a quarter/mid/whatever crisis? I’m excited to introduce the brilliant guest writer on this topic:
who writes , a psychotherapist and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.p.s. by the way! I will be in conversation in person with Satya on May 15th at the brilliant Up Up Books in Portland, Oregon! If you know friends in the area, please share the link with them! If you’re in the area, please come! You can grab your ticket here.
The “quarter-life crisis”
(and the unguided quests of adulthood)
By Satya Doyle Byock
Years ago, while living in California, mildly frazzled, overly tired and knee-deep in graduate school, I needed a fairy tale. I had a deadline for a paper coming up fast, this one a psychological analysis of a piece of folklore. I was excited about the assignment and wanted to find the right story. There were obvious choices: houses made of sugar, glass slippers and magic beans. But nothing seemed to spark an interest.
In the school library, I found a huge collection of Brothers Grimm’s tales and, as if drawn by some spell, opened the book to “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”. It’s a lesser-known tale (with an unwieldy title) of a young man with a timeless problem – his father is desperate for him to learn something practical, something that will earn him money. And yet, the young man is distracted. The only thing he wants to learn is “how to shudder”. (After overhearing those around him saying that scary fearful things often 'make them shudder'.) After irritating his father with this bizarre interest and then accidentally injuring the town’s priest who’d attempted to scare him, the young man sets off on his own to pursue his quest.
I didn’t understand yet why this odd tale, out of all available stories, appealed to me. But it did, like it was waiting for me to find it. I read it over and over again and spent weeks on a paper that shouldn’t have taken me so long.
It wasn’t until I was working on my book that I understood the extent of overlap between the Grimm’s young man and myself. The truth is, the purely linear trajectory of adulthood seemed barren and unappealing. Everyone around me had been nudging me towards stability and participation in the economy, but something unnamable demanded my attention instead. Through symbolic longings and strange hunches, I was in search of a deeper sense of myself and of embodied existence. I understood that young man implicitly: it wasn’t actually fear he sought, but a return to his instincts, a felt experience of his own life and aliveness.
And I’m not alone. Most of us are sold the idea that to live in the “real world” is to emphasise financial stability and, beyond that, the creation of a family. We’re told that to be a true adult is to engage in production and procreation, without complaint. On the other hand, seeking answers to deeper questions or pursuing any search for meaning is viewed as rather sappy or new-age. To be in crisis? A disgrace. One receives plenty of implied or direct encouragement to “pull yourself together” and “button up”. And yet, on the vertical ladder of modern life, nagging doubts often do arrive at some point to suggest that, certainly, something is missing from the script of modern adulthood.
“We want, ultimately, to feel that our lives on this earth have meaning and that our role in our society has a purpose.”
We want, ultimately, to feel that our lives on this earth have meaning and that our role in our society has a purpose. We long to feel that our external world and our inner world are in agreement with one another. To get there, we instinctively know that we might need to take some risks and pursue our own quest for embodied life. We might be forced to surrender to some unknown path, destroying some of the structures we’ve previously known, grieve losses of things we’re forced to leave behind and then nestle into cocoons to prepare, slowly, for rebirth as different creatures than we were before.
Cultures worldwide once hosted complex initiation rites to support this process. Participants were to die to their childhoods, tap into greater resources within themselves and be psychologically reborn. Without these rites, many are left floundering, left with a sense of absence, and left to sort out the personal transformation on our own – or live in perpetual doubt. ‘Am I really an adult? Is this all there is?’
Grimm’s young man ultimately found what he was looking for, though only after three men tried unsuccessfully to terrify him (to try and make him shudder) with ghosts, corpses and a haunted castle. His journey concluded when his new wife, annoyed by his mutterings about not knowing how to shudder, stripped off his clothes while he slept and poured cold water over his body. The man awoke like a brand-new baby, laughing and thrilled. “I know what it is to shudder!” he shouted. It wasn’t danger that he sought, but the fulfilment of his inexplicable quest and integration into his body. As if awakened from a stupor, he felt joy at the deep feeling of being alive.
How to Handle a Crisis When it Arrives
Crises come at all points of life. They are often periods of a symbolic death and rebirth that can usher in new waves of creativity and an evolution of identity—but not without plenty of pain and confusion along the way. These shifts can be supported with good self care, or prolonged with substances and avoidance. I encourage my clients to keep to the basics:
eat good nutrition in the mornings, even if it means swallowing down a protein smoothie.
sleep whenever possible, and get outside for some movement.
find good people with whom you can be a mess without apology. Therapy is good for this.
stay away from scrolling and screens as much as you can.
embrace boredom. Your overwhelmed and exhausted system needs space to release.
surrender. Some of the old patterns and structures must be allowed to die away in order for new creativity, sweetness, and life to emerge.
trust that all things have a season and remember: this too will pass. There’s no way to imagine in the midst of the suffering what goodness is yet to come.
Satya writes the Substack Self & Society.
Emma will be in conversation with Satya on May 15th at Up Up Books in Portland, Oregon. You can grab your tickets here.
I read Satya's book, Quarterlife, last year. It's brilliant! I found the differences between Stability Types and Meaning Types fascinating. When I finished the book it was like a big hug because I finally realised that I'd been seeking stability throughout my twenties, and the unsettled feelings I was experiencing as I entered my thirties were all pointing me to breaking away from what I had built to start finding meaning. Honestly, Satya's words gave me so much clarity ❤️
It’s weird, Emma, this post isn't showing up in my Substack inbox. I only came across it because you shared it in notes. I checked again just now, but I still can't see it in my inbox. I have disabled email notifications and prefer to read through the Substack app, but I'm surprised to see now that it’s not delivering all posts 😢