Waking Up and Finding a Direction: A Reflection on Entering my mid-20s
"You have so much time!!"
As cliché and played out as it may be, I feel like I'm entering my own Carrie Bradshaw era on my 25th birthday and the 25th anniversary of Sex and the City: I want to document and experience my life as a writer. It's strange that I've latched onto this idea, especially since I had a microdose of an existential crisis last week. However, it's the most aligning action I've taken in months.
On the day of my 25th birthday, I woke up panicking with a pain in my chest (no exaggeration). It felt like the last grains of sand had fallen into the bottom of the hourglass. Just like that, I had gone through high school, college, worked numerous positions in the restaurant industry, met so many friends and acquaintances that provided the catalyst for my coming of age experiences and personal growth. Yet, I woke up in my semi-messy childhood bedroom, $20K+ in debt, and working two jobs I hated to make ends meet. The week before, a considerate friend sent me two separate Venmo requests — one right after a fun weekend and another on Friday, a common payday — that split the cost of an average weekend out in San Francisco. It was a genuinely thoughtful gesture that I internalized as a backhanded move to remind me that the culmination of all my experiences and decisions had landed me here.
I knew my birthday was coming, and I've been dreading it. I've been working 50-60 hour workweeks at food service joints since April to maintain the same quality of lifestyle I have, in addition to paying back the loans for the UX design program I took last year. But more significantly, I was working so much to numb myself from all my perceived failures. I was on my way to realizing my goal of becoming a cushy UX Designer that utilized my multiple interests within the arts and humanities, as well as providing me with a livable wage (not just surviving). I had a design internship at the beginning of this year at a start-up, volunteered within an amazing team to build a mental health app, and built a website with a local business.
It all sounds good on paper, but to be honest, I was experiencing professional growing pains, something I didn't really exercise in my early 20s. Everything in a bulleted list on a LinkedIn post that stated " ❌What Not to Do For Your First Position as a Designer ❌" or as any young corporate professional could pass as a physical description of me: Short, black hair, 5'1", shared too much about her interests at the monthly company meeting, not asking for help, insecure about my capabilities — I did and I felt like I was Icarus with an iPhone 12 pro. It made me want to shrink and deactivate all of my social media channels. Coupled with a careless mistake that now affects my financial future for the next three years, I decided to walk away. "At least for a few months," I would tell others superficially.
Such behavior would somewhat pass and could be redeemed from if I was in my late teens. It was easy to amount this to laziness and to imply on a deeper level that I wasn't capable of getting my life together. I could just let it go and focus on something else and try again — or try something else — at another ambiguous tomorrow. Leaving this up to chance, however, felt terrible. Even in the years approaching this point of my life, I could already see how vastly different all our paths could be at this age — and its permanence. Friends were getting engaged and/or married, or raising their kids, or going through pharmaceutical residency, or working from home, or working incessantly at a dead-end job to keep up with the economic demands of the times. At the end of the day, 25 is an arbitrary number, but something in me feels that I had to commit to something soon to get the respect I desperately wanted to feel. How could I have so many opportunities, the capability to know better, but decide to spend hours tuning out instead of pushing my work forward?
I've gotten that respect by taking many directions in the past. And every path that I've taken was with the intent that at some point, I could feel successful via external means — money, approval by loved ones. But what initially attracted me soon repelled me when I saw that things could go wrong and hard, and I would have to take up the responsibility to clean up my mess. Continuing to leave my messes would result in a tomorrow I wouldn't want to brave facing anymore.
It wasn't just my career either. The faith I had in my relationships was fading too. All of the labels to my external identity felt like they were crumbling the more I looked back and kept reprimanding myself for all my mistakes. For letting my fear keep me from fully entering the door, withholding care such as fully committing a project, to ensure my loved ones how much I cared about them through small gestures that minorly inconvenienced me but would have turned into core memories.
Deep down, I don't think it was the number of friends that didn't greet me on my birthday, or the emptiness I felt when I watched the Barbie movie and got a new tattoo on the same day by myself, or even the seemingly cataclysmic moments that led me to depart from design. I think when I woke up that morning, I realized I couldn't keep running away from myself. I can't keep reinventing myself and leaving when things got too uncertain. I had to find a sustainable and healthy way to keep my own sense of self-reliance and empowerment.
Getting to the root of what holds me back would result in another blog post about trauma that I could expand on another time. But a lot of my coping mechanisms revolve around avoiding the extremely good and bad things that could happen to me to retain a sense of control over my life. But, as mentioned in the famous book "The Mountain is You" by Brianna Wiest, having such a self-sabotaging mechanism can only be utilized for so long. Although shedding such ways to cope feels uncomfortable, acknowledging that "All you're going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are" can foreshadow a more fulfilling life. And although that means that you may not have your safety net with you all the time — whether that be your support system or a timeline of your life that you dream about but never act on, etc. — it does offer the opportunity to build a rewarding foundation, which is reassurance and strength in yourself.
Of course, there are many ways to do that. There's enough self-help content on the internet that can help you get started, and I'll be exploring that more in future posts (or have a full book review on "The Mountain is You" lol). But I will say that what helped me get started was finding a direction — like making the baby step of starting a blog — and sharing a ubiquitous experience that I hope inspires someone out there to wake up.