Quarter Life Crises

As the typical Sunday night anxiety sets in (with me and all my roommates), I'm starting to wonder whether this anxiety is just connected to TFA or if it's something that all college graduates experience, a suffocating paranoia that our lives will be the same- miserable and hard- from this point forward. That maybe it never gets any better, that maybe we'll be worrying about money and jobs and relationships forever.

That's depressing.

I'm looking at the things stressing me out tonight, and of course teaching this week is occupying one of the top places on the list. But I'm actually in a good place to start this week. I'm planned, I know the things I need to get done and when they need to get done by (and I have time to get them done), there are only a few loose ends that need to be tied up (especially in comparison to where I've been in past weeks). There are other things, looming, behind all the teaching stress, things like missing my friends and family and boyfriend, things like feeling uncomfortable in this region, like I'm out of place among the people around me. There's the fact that I have to worry about money and bills, that I don't understand my health insurance, that I need new tires on my car and I have no one to help me. Stupid things, on the spectrum of things that one should worry about.

But then, looking at them all together, I see them form one big, dark cloud of real life, hovering over everything I do. And that's the same for everyone, I think, regardless of what they choose to do after college. We all move away from our friends and family, we all struggle adjusting to new things and new places and new people.

I guess that's what it comes down to. Change will inevitably be stressful, and difficult. You have to redefine what being happy means and sometimes the things that used to make you happy can't make you happy anymore, at least not in the same way, because the context of the new situation doesn't translate. I'm finding that I'm not making the adjustments necessary to keep myself happy the way I used to because I'm expecting the same things to work. That's the reason for the quarter life crisis- whether it's mine or my roommate's or some recent college grad I don't even know- that the final shift into "real life" has occurred and that's scary as hell.