My life has descended into the worst kind of cliche: the quarterlife crisis.
Just writing those words makes me cringe. John Mayer wrote a song about it, Alexandra Robbins wrote a book about it, and googling the term offers up 65,200 results. Wikipedia even has an article on it. Owning up to it puts me in a camp with everyone I never wanted to be: the kids who spent three years post-graduation draining their trust funds while experimenting with Buddhist monasteries, Colombian drugs and Thai prostitutes, trying to “find themselves” and whining about how having so many options is just sooo hard. Ew?
My own crisis has been brewing for a while. Six years in and out of college meant that, by my last semester, I thought I’d be nothing but relieved to be done. But before I’d even graduated, I was already regretting my choice to major in English. It was the only major I’d ever seriously considered, and yet, during those last four months, I beat myself up for ever picking the liberal arts. Why hadn’t I majored in fucking business? Those who know me realize how utterly anathematic this is to my entire philosophy, which goes something like this: business students have black holes where their souls are supposed to be. But! My business school friends all had jobs lined up six months before they graduated, and on the eve of being thrust into the real world with no clue what I wanted to do to make a living, becoming soulless was looking more and more appealing.
With an English degree, it was hard to narrow down the field. Whether I picked publishing, copyediting, or P.R., I was obsessed with the idea that I might be missing out on a better option. At least with a marketing degree, you knew exactly what you’d be doing after commencement. At least with a marketing degree, you were learning concrete skills — not writing papers on Ezra Pound’s symbolism. I’d been told my whole life that college was about learning to think for yourself, but this was bullshit. All I’d learned in college was to regurgitate what my professors told me and dress it up in pretty rhetoric and metaphor. After graduation, trying to make a decision on my own terrified me. I wanted someone to tell me what to do.
9/11 gets the blame for every major sociological trend our generation has started: a return to conservative values even among the traditionally uber-liberal young, a rash of reckless marriages (hello, Jessica Simpson & Nick Lachey), a craving for the kind of job security that went out the door in our grandparents’ generation — or, conversely, the pathological inability to commit to any job for more than six months, constantly concerned that somewhere out there, we were missing out on a better option. After all, life is short — why wait it out? The fall of the towers struck us much the same way that World War I impressed upon the Lost Generation. There had been boundaries about the role our country played in the world, and suddenly, without our permission, those boundaries were moved. We were forced to question what we’d held, our entire lives, to be true.
While we aren’t the first generation to experience this purposelessness — as first Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s drifting, and later St. Elmo’s Fire and Reality Bites make patently clear — we’ve certainly perfected it. We were the first kids to be shuttled from violin lesson to tennis match to SAT prep course in order to get into the perfect college, all so we could become rich, famous, and world-changing — by the age of 30. It’s no surprise that we demanded that our midlife crises come earlier, too.
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Waitressing and writing for a year were supposed to clear my head. They were the two things that I knew I could do, and at least one of them was a job I knew I could make money off of. But the economy slid southward, hiring ground to a halt, and suddenly I was stuck questioning the concept of stability. I was making more selling salads and margaritas than any of my friends were making at their entry-level jobs, and as long as I could drag myself to work on even my most hungover mornings, I had a zero percent chance of losing my job. Not having health insurance was a minor drawback as I watched my friends get laid off, collect unemployment, or succumb to grad school-inflicted breakdowns. If money and stability were my goals, I was better where I was — for the time being, at least. But can anybody truly be happy working 60 hours a week in a job that serves no other purpose other than to get people fatter and drunker?
So here’s what I’m committing to fix:
1) I got sick of Madison around 2004, but finding a replacement has proven to be harder than I thought it would be. If a city isn’t too cold, it’s too hot. If it’s not too small, it’s too expensive. And if it commits the unforgivable sin of being without character, forget it. This has got to get figured out first, because I’m moving by fall.
2) Determine What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.
3) Get skinny. A lazy winter, plus trying to keep up with a boyfriend who has killer metabolism and loves beer and burgers, has resulted in my weight sliding towards the high end of the “acceptable” scale. No matter how much I accomplish with the rest of my life, it always comes back to the fact that my thighs are too big.
4) Be less ignorant. About geography, about history, about language, about politics. There is so much out there that I have to learn, and I’m sick of being in the dark. My world is small, and I want it to be bigger.
5) Write.
I’m giving myself a year.
