As silly as it sounds, I only just became introduced to the term "quarter life crisis."
Before it, I always wondered what that feeling was that jerked me awake at all hours of the night. What made me feel the Sunday Scaries on a Wednesday. What made me break down in tears at the mere thought of where I see myself in 5 years or so. Then it hit me: there's a name for something exactly similar to a midlife crisis but for 20-something-year-olds.
I honestly don't know when this quarter life crisis came to be or what even triggers a crisis like this in the midst of our quarter life.
Maybe it happens when your college advisor tells you you'll be graduating later than your graduating class if you stay a Biology major but a semester earlier than your class if you change your major entirely to English. Maybe it happened when you came to the jarring realization that your childhood to early adulthood dream of medical school just simply can never be because of the differences in the makeup of your intelligence and others. I want to believe that my quarter life crisis happened when it suddenly occurred to me that every "bad" and unfortunate thing to happen to me up until now are things I have zero control over. Once this realization sunk in, it was hard to shake off because, as per the cliche saying, if everything happens for a reason, what's been the reason for the occurrences these past few months? If everything is supposed to happen for a reason, I can't help but think what the end goal is.
For me, a quarter life crisis has less to do with a physical crisis and more to do with the build up of question marks about one's life. Back when I was an incoming freshman, the thought of being a senior in college was such a distant thought that it felt like it would never come. Weirdly enough, I never saw myself coming this far in my college career but now that I'm here, the hurdles I now see myself facing seem never ending and I chuckle at 18-year old me. Incomplete plans after graduating, a struggling long distant relationship, girls with bad weave jobs still playing petty games at a bar downtown and the overall uncertainty of where I'll be five years down the line are all things that find myself internally struggling with in this difficult time of my life, more known as a quarter life crisis.
It's uncertain whether or not waking up tomorrow will prove to be vastly different than what the mornings these past few months have been but what I do know is this: we can try our hardest to be a good person with even better intentions and that has to count for something soon, whether or not we're caught in the middle of a quarter life crisis, right?
