the inevitable, mid-twenties slump
Like most teenagers in America, my youth consisted of a very booked, rigorous schedule.
Monday. Wake up. Brush my teeth. Wash my face. Eat breakfast. Get coffee from Dunkin on my way to school. Sit through 8 hours of classes. Go to golf practice (yes, I’m serious!). Go home. Shower. Do homework. Eat dinner. Go to bed. Repeat.
Of course, this schedule varied depending on the day. Some weekdays, I would have meetings for the various clubs and organizations I was a member of. On the weekends, I would mix in social time with friends, maybe pick up a shift at the local clothing boutique I worked at, or work on my college applications.
However, every day of my teenage years was meticulously planned out by the minute, with little to no room for adjustments. It was almost comforting in a way, knowing that nothing was to be unexpected.
My college years looked relatively the same, except with a little more socializing and a few extra hours to sleep in when I didn’t have classes. Regardless, I found comfort in the routine I had created for myself and never strayed far from the path. I truly believe Google Calendar also become one of my best friends.
The second my formal education ended, and I was catapulted into the “real world” involving a formal 9-5 job, I realized how much I struggled to keep the same discipline and motivation I had the year prior.
Waking up early became harder. Gathering motivation to be active felt like a chore. All I could get myself to do was come home, eat dinner, shower, and rot in my childhood bed for hours until I fell asleep, woke up, and did the same all over again. My only true escape was the weekends. Because of my lack of socialization during the week, I overbooked my two days of freedom with endless plans of partying, dancing, and socializing in any way possible. By the time the weekend was wrapping up, my Sunday scaries crept in quickly and I restarted the next week with the fear of reliving this all over again.
The interests and hobbies that used to take up hours of my day ceased to exist in my post-graduate schedule. I lacked motivation to write like I used to. Workout classes never seemed like they were worth the effort, even though I used to go to the gym daily in college. Rather than choosing to read the new book my mom recommended to me, I chose to doomscroll on TikTok instead.
Why the sudden shift?
In the last two years, I’ve dealt with something all young twenty-something-year-olds inevitably experience. The quarter-life crisis of rediscovering who you are, and figuring out who you eventually want to be. For me in particular, I fell into a cycle of slumps. Transparently, the last few months have been one of my worst slumps to date.
I think this is for a few reasons. First, my career has taken up most of the space in my brain. Working in a demanding field like fashion is not easy. The expectations are high, and the status quo is that your job = your life. If that isn’t how you feel, you’re told you simply won’t cut it. Let me tell you, this mentality can be hard to shake.
Second, we live in a society that is centered on consumerism. We are constantly being told we need something new and exciting to make us happy. Whether it’s a promotion at our jobs, a luxurious vacation somewhere excting, or a brand new wardrobe for the season, we are convinced that the way our life is on its own is simply not enough.
You may be asking - how does this play into a quarter life crisis?
Think about it this way. When I was younger and stuck in a pretty mundane routine, I still felt satisfied because there was no expectation for anything more, at least not immediately. As an adult, we are convinced we should have it all figured out. We should have money in the bank, a job that provides us with the perfect amount of fulfillment, a social circle we can rely on consistently, and a million other little things that consumer culture tells us we need. It’s hard to find space for things you enjoy when you constantly have one million voices pulling you in different directions.
The past few months, I lost interest in a lot of things that once came easily to me on any given day. I don’t write. I don’t go on walks like I used to. I even struggle to watch movies without getting distracted and scrolling on my phone instead. I have been in a major funk, and I didn’t even realize it until I went home for Mother’s Day.
Whenever I go home, my parents always remind me how lucky I am, and how envious they are of the life I get to live at my young age. Hearing them say this made me truly realize how right they are. The second I got back to the city, I made a vow to myself that I am going to change my mindset, and revive the lifestyle that used to come easily to me.
Coming out of a three-month long slump is not easy. But, luckily for us, growth doesn’t look the same for everyone. It’s the fact you are trying at all that makes it worth it. So, here are some of the steps I am taking to regain my love for life, even if my life is a slightly mundane one.
Fix my lack of attention span. This is one symptom of my slump that I noticed almost immediately. I rarely can stay focused on one thing for more than 10 minutes without wanting to do something else. Often, this leads to me scrolling on social media for hours, consuming nothing of substance. Instead, I am making an effort to engage with different kinds of long form media. Whether I watch a movie, read a few chapters of a book, or listen to a podcast, I am dedicating myself to making these my go-to forms of entertainment, rather than sitting on my phone for hours on end.
Be more reflective. For someone who loves to write, I do not own a journal. I know, crazy right? I guess you can argue that this blog serves as a sort of journal, these posts are written, edited, re-read, and filtered down so I give you the best version possible (as all good writers do, of course). Keeping a written journal will allow me to focus more on my raw, real emotions and experiences, unfiltered and unedited. I hope it allows me to take all the good with the bad, every single day.
Revisit old hobbies and interests that once brought me joy. This can be interpreted in different ways. For me, some of my hobbies are not necessarily physical activities. For example, I majored in Psychology in college, simply because I found it incredibly interesting. I loved learning about the human psyche, discovering ground-breaking research, and figuring out how theory could apply to my daily life. I am trying to relearn one thing about Psychology every day - whether it is through reading or a podcast episode. Also, for those of you who don’t know, I love to bake. I used to try new recipes all the time when I lived at home, and it always felt so rewarding to see how they turned out. It’s actually quite silly that I lost sight of this interest, because I currently have two roommates who would happily be my taste-testers!
All in all, escaping a slump is never easy. Hell, I go through them on and off every few months. To be fair, we all do, it’s normal. But, one of my new favorite podcasts, The Psychology of your 20’s, had an entire episode about the Psychology of finding happiness in your life. One of the final parts of the episode discussed how people who have the highest life-satisfaction scores tend to view their life as a woven tapestry, filled with all different emotions, good and bad. These individuals believe that their life is fulfilled because they get to experience all emotions, from happy to sad, from envious to surprised. This mantra stuck with me, and helped me learn to embrace the slumps, but remind myself they are temporary. In fact, they are just a small piece of fabric in the tapestry of my life, and yours too.
