Too many directions, not enough time.

We have fallen victim to the Quarterlife dilemma: too many options of things to do and not enough time in which to do them. More so, we have failed to focus in on what is supremely important and leave the other things behind. Drop one thing to catch another and hope you can get back and pick that other thing up.

It seems as though my particular experience with the Crisis has led me to perpetuate this attitude of “pile it on”. At the lowest point of my crisis, my fear was living a life with no purpose and nothing to accomplish. In digging myself out of that hole, I just started doing things. I scheduled events where other people relied on me. Singing engagements, catering events…anything to get me out of the house and responsible to someone. In my haste to rejoin the human race, I started to get carried away.

This past semester, I found myself juggling too many things: school, two jobs, a social life, my first serious relationship in over two years, a parent with cancer, an election, a website, and attempting to feed myself in regular healthy increments. The zeal of Quarterlife recovery may have gone a little overboard in my life. Rather than feeling regretful at taking on too much, I have felt relieved to know that there was a limit. I think coming out of a QL crisis is much like building momentum. Your inertia keeps you static. To get moving, you have to overextend yourself, and once the ball is actually rolling, you may end up going too fast- but it was the push you needed to get back on your path.

This is not to say that once you get out of your crisis that you won’t have to face the same damn problems over again. A few of us have even started to feel what seems to be a relapse. Now that things are somewhat back to normal, those same old questions and the same non-existent answers pop back into your daily dialogue…”What do I want to do for the rest of my life…where should I be living…do I really want to get married now…is it time for kids…I’m not happy.”

The real trick now is to keep moving without killing ourselves. It’s knowing how much to back off so that the things that feel important come to the forefront. Its saying “No, I don’t think I’ll take that overtime because I really would like to write an article for the website and that is more important to me right now.” Further, its knowing when sitting at home playing Mario Kart is not necessarily a sign that you are back on your downward slope to depression and stagnation.

No doubt, a Quarterlife Relapse is a terrifying notion. No one wants to go back to that place once you’re out of it. I certainly don’t have the answers to those questions that keep me up at night. I don’t expect that I ever will. The best I can do for myself at the moment is keep moving towards one answer at a time. By paring down, I hope to see a little more clearly what is missing and what I truly want to focus on. This site is one of those things that is important to me, if for nothing else than to know that other people are out there feeling the exact same things.