Quarter-Life Crisis

"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75."

I can't begin to describe how I've been feeling recently. Although to give it a title, I'd call it my quarter life crisis. Some days I wake up in my apartment in NYC and I think about how amazing life is, how lucky I am to have a job/internship, to be attending school, to have some kind of security in my life. But then I start to panic. Since when was security and a planned out life my main focus? When did I give up the dreams of going abroad, learning new languages, eating strange foods, and toeing the line of "this is scary as hell" and "I can't imagine a better life."

Because I can imagine a better life. I feel like I'm getting so comfortable where I am that 60 years from now, I will stand up and realize that I haven't moved since I was 20. And I just don't know how to feel at this point in my life. As my parents are in their 60's and I'm in my 20's trying to get a degree in a field that means almost nothing to me just so I don't have to worry about the security of this tentative family I may or may not have in 20 years or so I can take care of my parents in however many years, I start to worry about myself. I start to wonder what happened to the 10 year old who wrote furiously in her journals because passion didn't live on her tongue, it didn't even live in her fingertips, it lived in the pens that she picked up.

What happened to that girl who promised that this small town she grew up in was just the first step of many she would take out into the world. But here I am, barely outside my doorstep, 10 years later. And maybe it's for a lack of trying, or maybe it's this insane pressure to not spend too much money so that I can afford the mortgage on the house I don't have so the family I don't have can eat well at the kitchen table I haven't even set yet.

And it is so frustrating to me that I'm not toeing the line between "this is scary as hell" and "I can't imagine a better life" but instead toeing the line between "this is scary as hell" and "life's okay the way it is." Because it feels like that line is really fine and it feels likes the plunge into "life's okay the way it is" is a far fall that I may not be able to pull myself out of.

I tell myself constantly that my degree is just a degree and it's what I choose to do with it that'll define me. But maybe it's the choices that I've already made that define me. Choosing to be an accounting major for the stability is... respectable to say the most. Everyone always says, "Accounting major? Smart girl!" But I don't feel smart, I feel... pragmatic. I feel scared. I feel like life has bullied me into being someone whose passion doesn't live in her heart, or her tongue, or her fingertips, but way in the back of her mind.

Yesterday, I was sitting at work, scanning papers, and scanning papers, and scanning papers, then checking 1099s, then filing, and making copies and putting together payroll taxes and all I could think was "Oh. God."

This isn't who I want to be at 20. I have so much to say and the fact that at work, my biggest tasks are printing out labels and my biggest problems are forgetting to properly punctuate said labels and having them torn and thrown on my desk... I feel like I've died already. I feel like I'm living in a fish tank and as much as I swim and hope, I just keep ramming my head against the glass. And it's so frustrating because you can see the outside. You see these large figures leaving, going places, turning the lights out on you and you think, okay, if I just swim a little harder... *bump*.

When I was at work yesterday, thinking about the fact that people keep saying, "One day that'll be you! You'll be running the office!" with a huge smile on their faces because they really  do mean it as a compliment. But all I hear is, "One day that'll be you! You'll have a degree! And then you get to complain about tax season and you will get to critique the interns for how straight their staples are and you'll get to come to work on Saturdays to make sure your clients are abiding by the new healthcare tax law and it'll be you lusting after your one week vacation" and all I can think is, "Is this what I'm aiming for?" I don't want to live my 20's just to be secure in my 30's. Isn't that what my 30's are for? For figuring out how to live them? 

Sometimes I want to stomp my foot and tell everyone how un-fucking-fair it is. How I didn't sign up for this. How I didn't agree to live by this timetable of college for four years and then another year for a masters and another year to get CPA certified until I realize, that I implicitly did agree to all that. But without me realizing it. I feel like at some point when I was 17 or 18 in high school, I unknowingly signed a contract when I bought my cafeteria lunch or checked a box on the Common App saying, "You will go to college. You will make the most of it, but after a year and a half or two, you'll realize that all these fantastical ideas you had about it are pretty much out of reach. This is due to the fact that everyone is asking whether you will graduate 'on time' though you will have no real clue what that means. Eventually, you will graduate, avoiding any detours because, everyone keeps stressing this timeliness, and you're still not sure whether you're late or early, but you'll be pretty sure 98% of the time that you're late despite your best efforts to be on time for this event, that you're not really even sure what it is, and you'll get there and you still won't be sure what it is until you've realized that what 'it' is, is actually the rest of your life. Enjoy as best you can and remember, don't be late."

I don't know if I can live by these schedules though. I don't know why I have to be done with college by 22 or 23 or 25. I don't know why it's considered a waste of time by the vast majority if I took a year to do something like learn yoga or how to cook. Why does that make me unreliable and unfocused? Or maybe I'm asking the wrong questions. But I don't know what else to ask or who to ask. I'm sure a lot people who are well into their careers would tell you "yes" if you asked them generally, "Are you happy?" But the way I see it, that question is a lot like being color blind. You don't know you are or aren't until it's pointed out to you what's missing. You don't know that anything is abnormal because you are living in your own reality, until someone says "Wow, why's that 'Stop' sign painted green? They're usually red." and you're standing there like, "Huh?" 

What if one day I'm living my perfectly perceptually happy life until a gust of wind blows or someone knocks on my door and I realize that my reality, my definition of happy, while fine the way it is, is just that, fine. What if one day someone points to a "Stop" sign and tells me it's green and no matter how hard I look I can't see the difference between that one and all the rest because I was never given the chance to? But this time, it won't be because of genetics, it's because I cornered myself into a life of limited experiences, and views, and thoughts? I just don't know what to do with this.

As much as I want to just go out and do what I want, I feel this insane guilt. I feel selfish giving up a job to travel or paying an extra semester or year's worth of tuition because I wanted to try something new. I wonder if I have the right to be so selfish, since after all, the only person I really have to make happy is myself. But life isn't so black and white.