And all I got was this stupid quarter-life crisis.

Note: at the time this article was written, the author was much closer to 26. Her excuse for writing this late was her quarter-life crisis lmao

YouTube has been such a gift to me. Imagine being able to view concerts that aired before you were born. Or losing a few brain cells in the process of watching DIY videos that should definitely have health warnings that read “Imminent death. Go collect stamps instead”. If you’re me, you watched a lot of commercials from the 1960s and 1970s to get a feel for what America might have been like several decades ago. I’ve struggled to find it since, but I remember watching this one commercial where a man’s coworkers were celebrating his birthday at work. There were streamers, cake, and well-wishes; but where was the man? Sitting in his office, resignedly looking at his cake, which read “40”. Which would’ve put his birthdate somewhere around 1930, but that wasn’t the point of the commercial. It was a commercial warning against ageism. At that time, people were genuinely afraid to be let go from work because they were 40. Which is crazy now, because that’s around the age that people in corporate America become C-level executives. Some people might buy their first homes at that age or get married and maybe have a kid or two. Or move again. 40 isn’t really that old, and our life expectancy from 1970 has increased about 11.8% (70.71 years to 79.05 years in 2022; https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy). Note: in moments of strife, the curve flattens a bit (Vietnam at the beginning of the 70s and our political landscape since 2015).

Some people act like turning 30 is the beginning of the end. It also doesn’t help that both women and men get opposing advice on how to approach aging, and it’s no walk in the park for women. Take it from someone whose dad was born in 1952: both of my grandmothers had given birth at least three times by the time they were my age. I have three college degrees, existential anxiety, and a fear of newborns. Not that I envy their positions; I’m glad that I can both read and write. And things generally get better for successive generations. But man, if that hasn’t raised the stakes to scary heights, and increased my anxiety about being 25 in the process.

“You’re old now!” is what my dad said on my 25th birthday (so much for turning 40). Or something like that. I had dreaded turning 25 for awhile and that was partially attributed to the following:

• The lore surrounding quarter-life crises and me being a student of the internet and learning about this when I was in my earlier twenties,
• My parents not-so-subtly mentioning marriage and my dad’s laundry list of attributes he’d love to see in a future son-in-law (and me getting properly heebie-jeebied enough to push marriage off the table for a good 5 years and also keeping potential folks away from my folks),
• Coming of age in the pandemic. I graduated from grad school less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world as we know it and promptly spent 2-2.5 years working from home and not experiencing my life the way I thought I would, and
• My career not panning out the way I expected it to. I outgrew my current job within a year of joining and am still working at it. I didn’t quit because of the pandemic in 2020, stayed through 2021 to make senior at my job, and am currently trying to sell myself as a competitive candidate in a field that only takes competitive candidates.

I could think of no better picture to describe how I felt on a screening call with a recruiter from a T2 consulting firm. Some hope: she really did like me and was (is?) willing to throw me out of the frying pan and into the fire soon-ish. Call me a scallop because I’m ready to be seared on both sides, bby gurl. Mmm, scallops…(UPDATE: it fell through. Mama is still searching.)

I didn’t grow up with many real measures of “success”. Growing up in a small, racially-homogeneous town (cough white cough) in a poorer part of Pennsylvania will do that to you. I got lucky, in the sense that at least one of my parents is well-educated and works at a university, but neither actively pushed me to be successful. It was just expected and I had no blueprints to work off of. It’s a bit ironic, but my professor parent refused to take me on tours for prospective colleges because he didn’t have time, so there you go. That’s what I dealt with. My existence prior to moving to California was pretty, ugh, milquetoast and restrictive. I moved because I wanted something different, and I was willing to be burned a bit in the process by people who were far smarter than me and far more capable than myself.

The more I think about it, I was set up to have a quarter-life crisis from childhood. Vague reassurances of my capabilities with little follow-through. No come-to-Jesus talks about any mistakes I made and how I could have avoided making them again. Add in a healthy amount of that existential dread, general confusion, and a skooch of arrested development (the actual stage, not the show, which I love), and you end up with someone like me.

I won’t go into much detail, but this year has been transformative. That’s a kind way to describe it, transformative. 2020-2021 was bad enough, but man, being tugged in ten different directions at the same time this year was rougher. Life was simpler when I was a junior consultant, still figuring out the ins and outs of my job; the hardest thing for me was decorating my then-bedroom. Or maybe life wasn’t simpler, but more consistent. And then the last month of 2021 happened and I had to find a new apartment. I got promoted, but my raise was lower than expected for my position. I was put on a hellish project and given my first lukewarm review in a long time. I left to join an innovation R&D wing in my firm and got flack from my advisors for being closed off about it. I worked long days and long evenings on an internationally-based team, going above and beyond the scope of what my position required. I started online dating (let me tell you, yikes. Three months in and the jury’s still out for men, unfortunately) and had to quickly become aware of how I presented myself, my wants, and my goals to other people. I’m now trying to quit my job because my dissatisfaction towards it is now bleeding into the parts of my life I’ve tried to protect from it. And all the while, therapy has been kicking my ass harder than I regularly kick my own ass, which is to say, with a bit too much enthusiasm because I was raised with a strong sense of self-punishment (note: kindness to myself is something I’m learning in therapy. It ain’t easy being Asian-American). Don’t even get me started on gearing up to apply for MBA programs next year…I do this to myself. So while we can argue that quarter-life crises just hit sometimes because they’re doing as crises do, maybe we should consider that they hit the ones who were showing cracks in their façade, at the very least–or the ones who appear to be the most dissatisfied and impatient with the direction their life is going in–the hardest.

If you work in consulting or any white-collar field, you’re probably familiar with KPIs, or key performance indicators. There are a vast number of KPIs and they differ from industry to industry and from project to project, but they all have the same purpose: measuring progress towards a larger goal. They can be broken into smaller components, which are usually easier to complete instead of tackling a whole KPI at once. Breaking them down incrementally also has the added benefit of better tracking where you are with respect to completion, and allows you to come closer to actually “measuring the journey” instead of clocking the destination as complete and moving onto the next. Which is just a super aspirational way of looking at it.

So how does this tie into getting hit that much harder with a quarter-life crisis? Well, if you go the KPI route, first off, you need to do something that reminds you that you’re a human and not a goddamn business goal. You’re not a D/E ratio or a satisfaction rating (if you are then it’s low, I’m sorry). You’re a person, and because you’re a person, life happens. You can take one step forward and fall into a hole. Progress isn’t defined wholly by an increase in whatever–especially if you find yourself still miserable. We aren’t scorecards. We shouldn’t always be metric-driven from a human-centered perspective. If you’re in the midst of an age-based crisis and think that knocking out a few of your goals will make you feel better, well…talk to me and ask me how it goes. Never underestimate our almost bottomless well of want, of the more, more, more. If I wanted to keep running on a wheel without a break, I’d have asked God a bit harder to be reincarnated as a hamster, instead of a sack of sentient meat with anxiety.

Maybe it’s also a curse of being more of a doer than a listener/experiencer. For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with just experiencing life and accepting it for what it was at the time. If I’m in a state of mild discomfort, I immediately think about what I can do to remove myself from that state. I’ve rarely tried to sit through it and let the waves of pain, rejection, life, etc. wash over me because, well, what if I drown in the process? What if I get pulled into the ocean, where I can’t swim? I’m always worried about things becoming worse, and I know now that I’m also likely to blame myself for things out of my reach. Not getting a job? My résumé is horrible. Not getting off of a project? I wasn’t assertive enough. That feeling of helplessness is so closely tied to a feeling of uselessness. Am I worth it? Is this all in vain? Will I ever get to a point where I feel like I’m back on top, in control of things? I act, not to avoid rumination, but because it’s my way of avoiding processing disappointment. If I act quickly enough, maybe I’ll figure out a solution quickly enough–that’s what I usually think. If I don’t act quickly enough, then I can’t be helped, right? I can’t say that I tried, right?

One of the most poignant a-ha moments I’ve had while weathering this crisis has been realizing that I’m a competitive person and that I’ve been doing two things my whole life that contradict each other. One, it’s taken me years to realize that I enjoy challenges and competitions, even if I grumble about them. Two, I have mostly (maybe up until a few months ago) seen myself as an inherently lazy person; the exact opposite of a self-starter, and someone who has to work like a dog before she sees any impactful change in her life. In a way, turning 25 made me struggle with coming to terms with who I actually am–and not who I was told to be. The crisis hurt (still hurts) so much because I was forcing myself to be someone who I was not, because it was tied so closely to my sense of worth at the time. So I broke that mold when I grew larger than what it could contain. I now have no new mold, I’m just…here. I have the least amount of structure I’ve ever had, and that makes me feel like I’m always floundering. I’ve never felt more like flubber in my whole life.

Or maybe I’m just walking with new, shaky legs. So the old foundation collapsed, and here I am, rebuilding it better, stronger, and hardier than before. It’s what I should’ve done years ago, but that doesn’t matter; what matters now is that I’m finally doing it. My quarter-life crisis has been so impactful largely due to me never having stood on stable ground until now. My therapist told me that I was my own parent now. That I had to actually do the legwork of constructing my life to my specifications because they were disregarded earlier. That life was going to be that much harder because, well, hard work is hard work. But that work wouldn’t be done in vain, and that I should see it as an opportunity to grow in the direction(s) I want to grow in. I am, after all, my own guardian. I have full autonomy over my life. It’s scary and thrilling at the same time.

It took me almost 11 months, from the day I turned 25 until now, to more fully realize that my quarter-life crisis helped me transition from a person who was constructed in the image of someone else’s ideals to a person who is creating herself from near-scratch. I’m still working on it. I think about how Michelangelo felt when he created David. How every chisel had some sort of intent behind it. How he saw David, trapped in that block of marble, and thought “free my boy he did nothing wrong” and then literally did it. He freed him. I don’t even have an iota of his talent but damn, am I freeing myself in the process. I don’t think I was, like, an unblemished slab of marble at any time other than my time of birth. But the chiseling that took place over the years lacked intent. It lacked finesse. I’ve been moving around for years like a partially-chipped and unfinished sculpture; and like David, I yearned to be sculpted to my potential. Of course, I never thought that I would be both the sculptor and the sculpture itself. Each day brings a new curve, a new set of cuts. It’ll take time, but don’t most good things take time? I’m in no rush. Especially when it comes to sculpting my marble posterior, lord…a work of art atop a work of art. I’ll pay extra attention to that part when I get to it.

I guess there’s not much of a satisfying conclusion here…is what I would’ve said a year ago. There doesn’t have to be one. I’m not out here with open arms, embracing my struggles. I’d still prefer snuggles over struggles, trust me. Instead, I’m accepting that transformation is hardly easy. It requires a lot of introspection and in some cases, unlearning. It demands that you see yourself for who you are now, without illusion. And it allows you the ability to discover who you want to be, if you’re willing to work for it. It won’t be easy and you WILL ugly cry a bit and question everything. But if you learn to appreciate the things that you do, the work that you have done, and continue to trudge forward, you might just be lucky enough to find what brings you purpose and belonging. You just have to bet on yourself, like actually bet on yourself. It’s like what I tell people–I bet on one person all the time, and it’s always been me. Why? It’s because I’m a good bet. It’s not a good stock picking strategy, but hey, at least I’m not a share of TSLA. And I always outperform the market over a period of time 😉

I’m 25 and all I got was this stupid quarter-life crisis that nudged me down a path of self-discovery and awareness. This stupid quarter-life crisis that gave me permission to rebuild my life and to realize who I was and what I wanted. This won’t be the end of me questioning all that life has to offer and what it’s offered me, but I can move forward knowing that I am in a headspace where I can make decisions and think without avoiding what’s in front of me. I think that’s a pretty fucking neat outcome, and no KPIs are needed here.

Keep chiseling (lmao) xoxo