Your crisis is my crisis

While lying on my back on a bench in Peoples Park in late April, surrounded by homeless musicians and dreadlocked vagabonds, I spoke to my father on my cell phone. I was chewing on a straw, as I had been for the last hour and a half.

“I’m considering just being a complete mess for a while,” I said matter-of-factly.

“Well, if you’re going to be a mess, there’s really no better place to do it than” – I joined him and together we said, “Bloomington, Indiana.”

“Good point, Dad.”

“Your mother did it for six years,” he added.

And there it was.

My mother took six years to finish her undergraduate studies. Half my friends are doing fifth years. The ones who are out in the world wait tables and work in shops. (Well, one works at the Wall Street Journal, but we don’t like to speak about her.) I’ve seen “The Graduate.” I’ve read “The Catcher in the Rye.” I am supposed to be prepared for this.

But it turns out you’re never prepared for the quarter-life crisis. That’s one of the characteristics of this phenomenon that plagues recent graduates. Other characteristics include anxiety about finding the right job, about money, about finding one’s soul mate and about getting stuck in a rut that lasts for one’s entire life. I’m not positive others experience this, but I have anxiety about having anxiety. So, that’s fun.

It feels like what I imagine being pushed off a cliff feels like. Except you also have a guilt about your fear because your parents are still paying your health insurance, there are starving children in Sudan and you probably will get married someday – it’s just hard sleeping alone right now – etcetera.

So what do you do? A friend of mine went to his cousin’s place in Amsterdam and spent three months chain-smoking on the beach, which sounded about right. Some others are teaching English overseas.

And then there’s the majority of people who take “temporary” jobs in the food service industry in which they spend the entirety of their six-hour shifts talking to whomever will listen about their creative pursuits or how they plan on going back to school someday. This happens until they wake up one day in their mid-40s, in most cases.

It’s scary out there. And it’s uncertain. Even the authors of http://www.quarterlifecrisis.com, the award-winning Web site that is supposed to be the best support community for terrified 20-somethings, put the phrase “real world” in quotes. It’s as if even those people who got through the crisis are still unsure of what the real world actually is.  

To this end I have absolutely no answers. But what I do have is a lifelong history of crippling anxiety and a laundry list of mistakes made throughout the course of the last year or so. And what you have is a promise from me that next Thursday I will share some of these with you. I hope you’ll read, and who knows, maybe it will help you a little. Don’t jump off any cliffs before then.