On goals, the road to them, and life in between.
For two years in a row, I have managed to stay on top of my New Years Resolutions for Ten months. This is surprising to me because ten months is a long time. Ten months is the vast majority of the year!
But it’s still only ten months and not twelve, which I find super frustrating. WHY CAN’T I DO THINGS PERFECTLY?
And so now I have this on my list to ponder for next year. Why ten and not twelve? Is it that I get bored (high possibility)? Is it something about October? Is it both? What gives?
A year ago I was scrambling to find resources to help me manage my full-time work with people. I was a team leader that meant I managed a staff team (people work) and talked to other people all day. I was struggling to have any desire to have friendships at the end of the day. I talked to my friends basically only by text. This blog was the place I worked out some of the things I learning about how to streamline my life to manage everything all while trying to achieve in the long-term the things I wanted to.
This year I don’t manage that team. Nor do I work primarily with people. I mostly work to create capacity so others can do a good job talking to people all day. The biggest shift I’ve seen in my life now is that I have relational energy at the end of the day.
I noticed this shift in a roundabout way. I was doing a random survey someone had tweeted to help their friend write a book. The survey asked questions about free time to do hobbies. Did I have enough? What were my hobbies? As I was listing the things I enjoyed doing I realized they were all solitary activities: writing, blogging, cooking, baking, reading. I imagine I developed the enjoyment of these in response to a largely extraverted life, full of people.
Now that I’m mostly engaging with people online through video chats, email, writing, and phone calls I’m wondering if I’ll still enjoy these primarily solitary activities? Is this why I’ve barely looked at twitter and my blog the last two weeks?
I keep finding myself planning to have people over. Every night! People! More people, please! I’m shocked at the one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn that I’ve done socially since April. I’m also looking forward to being an extrovert again.
Last week I mentioned a few books that helped me process and understand my quarter life crisis. (For the record, I still feel stupid every time I write that phrase.) Honestly, none of them were Book Saviour of my situation. Nothing I came across carried the epiphany that solved my broody inner conflict.
This book is also not that book. (Sorry.)
But, in a sense, the book is more than that. The whole premise of it is, as its subtitle says, embracing the tension between the now and the next big thing. It talks of the discipline of valuing the awkward in-between. Don’t worry, the book is not as painful as that sentence made it sound. Jeff shares how he has learned to find meaning and value in the times of waiting.
It’s something I’ve tried to get better at.
As I was reading this book, I thought, “this book would be good for people going through a quarter life crisis.” I also started wracking my brain of people who were in an in-between phase so I could recommend it to them.
And then I had a horrifying realization. I have been in the in-between state in certain areas of my life, too. It was better when I didn’t realize I was waiting and hoping for things. Now I feel like I’m in this purgatory and CAN’T GET OUT! Suddenly the book went from being something I wanted to pass on to someone who could benefit from it more, to something I was thinking about regularly, practicing often and ended up reading a second time.
The In-Between is a story of growth and change. The glimpses the author gives us could very well be from your life or mine. He’s adventurous and goal-oriented. But no matter how hard we work to get somewhere there are always times of waiting. How we respond to this waiting, Jeff says (and I totally agree), can say more about us than where we’re going.
Go leave a comment answer the question: What was your most recent ‘in-between’ moment or most difficult time of waiting? Then sign up for your copy of The In-Between by Jeff Goins!
The giveaway runs today until August 30 (2 weeks). You can get more entries by tweeting and sharing on Facebook daily (come back and update Rafflecopter each time). The only mandatory entry is a blog comment. Rafflecopter now works on iDevices.
“With professional athletes drafted out of high school and A-list singer-actors in their teens, we’re made to feel that if we haven’t achieved something monumental by the age of twenty-five, then we’re already over the hill.”
“Some adults — usually those in a midlife crisis— roll their eyes when they hear ‘Quarterlife Crisis.’ ‘Twentysomethings can’t be in a crisis!’ they say. ‘When you have your youth and freedom, you have nothing to complain about.’
“I try turning the tables. ‘If that’s your reason for dismissing a Quarterlife Crisis,’ I reply, ‘then how can you complain about a midlife crisis when you have a spouse, a car, a savings account, and a backyard with a pool?’ They are not amused. The generation gap grows fierce.” – Alexandra Robbins, It’s A Wonderful Lie
It didn’t take me long in my reading to identify with what these twentysomethings were talking about, but when I spoke about it with other people I found myself being met with laughter, scoffing and general mockery, just like the above quotation. People didn’t understand. This only made me want to turn even more into myself. Learning that this was actually a very normal thing for people my age, even if I might be the only one of my group of friends going through it, I was comforted. Later, I was able to talk to another close friend who went through a similar experience, just a year-and-a-half after I had.
My biggest questions at the time were “Who am I? What makes me unique? Where am I going?” Four years ago I struggled to respond well to these questions because I seemed to have and want all the same things that my friends from University did. We all mostly worked in the same field, had the same values etc. We didn’t all have the same likes and dislikes, but that didn’t seem to mean much at the time. “Where am I going?” was the scariest question of all. I had no idea. I was unhappy with my work situation, but felt trapped there because of my student loans. I fantasized about moving to Montreal and working at Starbucks, but that wasn’t a better option. I didn’t really want what I had. What I really wanted to was to marry a confident, ambitious man with a stable job who would love me and impregnate me and let me stay at home with our kids. But that didn’t seem like the right thing for a University grad to want right out of University. I felt guilty for having a degree and wanting to not use it, especially when my mom’s biggest life regret was not getting a degree.
I felt like (and was?) the biggest ungrateful whining spoiled child ever, and still couldn’t change how I felt.
Maybe you can identify more with Amanda. Her crisis came a year and a half after mine.
Like me, she graduated from Queen’s University with a (similar) degree in Geography/Women’s Studies. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life (read: career) but knew she didn’t want to do her Masters and that would be the level of education she’d need in order to use her degree practically. She had a significant amount of student loan debt and knew she couldn’t go back home to live with her parents because it just wasn’t an environment conducive to growing up. I like to say I convinced her to move to Montreal, but I’m pretty sure she’s an adult and came to this conclusion on her own. She came to Montreal and stayed with some generous friends while she tried to find a job. After weeks of looking, she managed to get a job at Second Cup — far from her dream post-undergrad job. She started looking for a church while trying to figure out her way in a bilingual city, knowing no French.
She hated the question, “where do you work?” because she graduated from Queen’s, well known for grooming snobs (I can say that because I am one) and she resented the fact that she worked at a chain coffee shop. As she started spiralling down into her own quarter-life-crisis, having no plan for a career because she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. I tried to remind her of a few important things: she had her faith, friends, family (at a distance) and was working on paying off her debt. These are key things in growing up! But I knew, having been in her position, that this was probably not as encouraging as it should be.
It was an extremely uncomfortable time for us, especially doing it alone. We were letting things about our lives define us instead of who we were and who we were becoming. We didn’t know who we were becoming and we weren’t sure if we were going to like us!
Were we still the same person we were in High School even though we haven’t achieved any of the goals we thought we would by now? “Who am I without having achieved anything significant?” we wondered.
But four years later, I’m doing more than OK. So is Amanda. Our life isn’t turning out how we expected it to, but we’ve come to terms with that. It’s OK.
As I was chatting with Amanda about publishing this post we agreed on this: this time was essential in developing our character. We learned what hard, thankless work meant and that lesson is invaluable. We learned more about our own faith and the truth of where and who we were putting it in.
I wish I could say “just do X” or “believe Y” to make the difficulty of the Quarter Life Crisis go away. I can’t. There’s no magic answer. It’s simply an awkward second puberty that only happens to some people. We struggle awkwardly in growing up. It’s hard. We learn we can’t base our identity in circumstances that could change like marital status, career possibilities, even family. Crisis happens, even when we know it’s rooted in our entitlement and spoiled-ness, which makes it even more frustrating.
We become, and years later we are still becoming. This is both scary and hopeful.
This summer marks the 4 year anniversary of my Quarter Life Crisis. I realized what was going on a year after I graduated University. I didn’t know what was happening to me I seemed to be the only one of my friends who was experiencing what I was. After some time on Google, I realized that I was probably having a quarter life crisis. I had never heard the term before. At the time, Wikipedia listed the following traits*:
I didn’t identify with all of them, but I was feeling the loneliness and missing University, I had the burden of $30, 000 in school loans, I was painfully single, I wanted kids, I was feeling like a failure because the place I was in my job was not at all as planned, and I was facing the fact that the world was not my oyster like I had previously thought. It was like growing up in the Shire and then being ushered into downtown Toronto where the cold hard buildings block out the sun and people are barking at you to get out of their way. Or at least, that’s how it felt.
The real world didn’t seem very pleasant.
After looking up ‘quarter life crisis’ on Wikipedia, I thought about checking to see what kind of books there were on the topic. I found a book called 20 Something, 20 Everything that explained it even more to me. The author had experienced what I had. She done some research and found out that this was fairly normal, especially for young female college grads. Here are a few quotes from other young women who were describing this time in their life:
I kept reading through this book and found so much comfort in the fact that I was one of many people who were going through this very same thing. And then came the check-list that might confirm it for you as it did for me:
Though I had said yes to all 10, I started to feel some hope. I was somewhat relieved to hear that other people did too. [To be continued…]
*The list is no longer there, but I kept a copy on my computer.
So I can now check off “publish ebook” from my list of things I wanted to do.
She’s out in the wild. I sent a scheduled email to go out yesterday while I was on vacation. Today the “My Ebook” tab appeared and the “Download Now” image to the right which is where you can go to get your copy. I’m surprised by how many of you have emailed me saying you’ve read it already! You sure know how to make a girl blush.
I’ve got another giveaway coming up soon. Another book. Yay!
