Quarter Life Crisis…

As I was confiding in a close friend of mine the other day, some could call it whinging, she mentioned the words ‘Quarter Life Crisis’. ‘Everyone goes through a quarter life crisis’ she said, and I thought Oh My God! why hadn’t I been prepared for this !!

Turning 25 at the start of April had turned into something I was dreading. However while telling myself the usual typical one-liners; ‘an age is only but a number right?’, ‘What difference will it make?’, I seemed to avoid any major tantrums on the day.

As the days rolled on after my birthday something in the way I was thinking about my life started to change. I started to become more critical, of myself and everything around me. While I’m perfectly comfortable and healthy I started to think, now edging closer to 30, had I wasted my life up to now!?

25 and haven’t moved out of home yet, oh the horror! Up to the big 25 this fact hadn’t too much bothered me, while I did quite often feel I had to explain it to people, now I felt I was having to reassure myself it was OK!  I began to feel inferior, comparing my circumstances to others around me, doubting my maturity, wondering if they doubted my maturity!? These negative thoughts weren’t just inward, I started projecting them outwards, complaining to anyone who would listen, nagging my boyfriend about our future, criticizing our life together so much that I’m sure I nearly drove him mad! It was definitely the cause of one or two fights. What was going on, this wasn’t me, I was meant to be confident and secure! Sure, I’m not where I really want to be in life at the moment, be that in my professional or personal life, but what was this sudden rush of negative emotions!?

Then I asked myself, am I really as confident or secure as I think? I’ve spent as long as I can remember being hyper critical of myself, comparing myself to others, not wearing skirts or short dresses because I think my legs are fat, wearing baggy clothes because showing my body might make the townsfolk recoil in utter revulsion, shying away from all forms of camera because the sight of my captured image sent me into some kind of ridiculous panic. NO FUN!, for me or people in my company.

Most tragic of all to me, I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties ‘putting on an act’, trying to be a version of myself that I thought people would like which, looking back must have came across so needy and awkward, and which on occasion concluded in awkward and dramatic events, which are today embarrassing to even recall. Trying too hard to the point of complete destruction is, I  think, the reason that in my mid-twenties I could count on one hand the amount of friends I actually have, shameful to admit but this blog is about honesty! The issue of ‘friends’ has always been a troubling one for me. Some say they are unlucky in love, I say I’ve been unlucky in friendships, future blog post all of its own!

I spent about a week (or more) moping around with all these negative feelings surrounding me, then I thought F* this, I’ve spent too long hiding under  a pile of baggy tops and leggings, too long hiding my face, too long complaining I didn’t have a body like that good looking girl on my Facebook news-feed!! Time to make shit happen, time to get that confidence I seem to be lacking! Sure I’ve made this promise to myself before and it turned out to be empty, however, there was something about this time that made everything seem so different, was my 25th birthday the event I needed to push me to change?

It annoys me no end when people make you feel like you need to apologise for ‘complaining’ about your age, they brush you off with the ‘Oh you’re only young’ comment! Age is such a personal thing and even more so how people feel about it. Let people whine for gods sake !! they aren’t calling you an old bag, they might just be saying they aren’t where they thought they would be in life!

I had never heard of a Quarter Life Crisis before but now its a phrase stuck in my mind. To me it is all about awareness, weighing up whats important and whats not, realisation of whats right or wrong in my life and gaining the utter unstoppable determination to transform myself into the person I have always had in my mind that I wanted to be.

So what did I do? I cleaned out my wardrobe, I started running (slowly), I created a blog, I decided to buy a bowler hat and I tried to start smiling for the cameras!

I am going to end this post with a quote that has really inspired me over the past while, from director, producer, screenwriter and all around risk taker Kevin Smith;

Thanks for reading!

xx