The quarter-life crisis is universal. It happens to people from all over the world, in all different phases of life, for all different reasons.
We struggle with finding our identity, pursuing our dreams, discovering what we actually want out of life, and evaluating where we are right now.
And one of the hardest things about all of this is this: No matter how many people we have in our corner, no matter whether you can vent to all your friends or only confide in your parents or maybe just your journal, it's lonely.
Why? Because you feel like you don't even know yourself.
You don't know what you want -- out of life, love, a career. You name it and there's someone out there struggling with it. And while I couldn't be more thankful for the people in my corner who have helped talk me out of anxiety attacks and breakdowns while I was sitting alone in a hotel in Pittsburgh, the honest truth of it is the quarter-life crisis is lonely.
You feel like no one can truly understand what you're going through. How can they help you answer all of these questions if you don't even know what you're looking for? Not knowing what you want is scary. It's terrifying.
How in world are we supposed to make all of these big life decisions as mere little twenty-something's?
Yes, we may have graduated college and have a nice little piece of paper that says we're ready to take on the real world. But are we really ready?
To be quite honest, I'm starting to ask myself if we will ever REALLY be ready. Will you ever know with 100 percent confidence what you want out of life? Should we ever know that?
I'm now a firm believer that this is what life is all about -- figuring it out. Adapting. Changing. Discovering. Dreaming. Trying. Failing. Trying again.
And if we are all asking these same questions, feeling alone, like no one else could possibly understand what we're going through, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot easier to manage if we decided to be lonely together?
Quite frankly, this is one of the main driving factors for why my boyfriend and I started our blog, Quarter for Your Crisis. So many of us are experiencing these tumultuous, flip-life-upside-down quarter-life crises. And yes, they may manifest themselves in very different ways for very different people -- but at some point, we're all in the same boat.
So why is no one talking about it? Shouldn't there be some kind of outlet for us crazy people who want a little more out of life?
This community is our own outlet for asking all of these crazy, scary, important questions we're facing at this point in our lives. We want to bring a voice to the quarter-life crisis, and hopefully, for some of us, make it a little less lonely of a journey.