The 25 year-old Identity Crisis
And how I’m trying to surpass it
It started growing with time. A year ago I landed what felt like the best career opportunity for someone who had finished the university a few months prior. I applied for an Internships Abroad Program that, after 4/5 months of intensive phases, would match my profile to a job opening literally anywhere in the world. It all seemed amazing. In my case, I found out in January that I was about to move to Milan for 6 months. My job would start in two weeks, I knew no Italian and didn’t have any living arrangements. Still, I wasn’t afraid of the unknown, and I was incredibly thrilled to restart life in a new culture.
I wouldn’t say that it all came crashing down as soon as I landed but slowly, I started to understand that the whole experience was about to be much more complex than what I was hoping for.
1rst Signs of Identity Crisis
The night I landed with my 3 extra heavy bags, it was raining like the world was coming to an end in Milan. I should have seen it as a sign, I guess. The first days were pretty harsh on me. I’ll spare you the details but after the first month of trying-to-find-the-positive-in-this pep talks, I started to understand that things were not fine. In fact, they weren’t even ok.
I started to feel stuck in the environment where I was. Mondays were the worst soul crashing days of the week and soon, they turned into Monday-to-Thursday awful days. Fridays were, obviously, the best because they meant having plans and being able to leave for a while. Looking back, I can see that these were my first signs of an Identity Crisis:
1) Boredom and feeling stuck. The despair of not wanting to start the week.
2) Self-doubt. The complete lack of confidence in my skills and feeling like I didn’t fit in the working environment.
3) Lack of Motivation. The lack of creativity and excitement that my days had.
4) Procrastination.The constant plans of new adventures that I could use to forget about what wasn’t working.
Setting into the Crisis
Those signs soon translated into:
5) Living life going through the motions. Even though I was in an amazing new city, had new friends and was enjoying the Italian Culture I wasn’t allowing it to satisfy me
6) Lacking spirit in everything I did.
7) Not being mindfully present and spacing out. I had great moments where I felt joy and gratefulness, but I treated them as snippets of freedom and not as part of my life.
8) Not being myself, or what I was hoping to become. I tried to fit into the identity labels that everyone else put me in, and allowed myself to fall into the pressure that came with it.
9) Activating the ‘’It is what it is’’ mode. It was much easier to settle into the ‘’life sucks’’ mode. I didn’t have to do any work against this society standard logo, and it was definitely easier than thinking ‘’There’s got to be more to life than this’’ and failing all the expectations that came with it.
‘’I don’t know who I am’’
Realization started to set in: I wasn’t myself because I didn’t know who I was. That also came in stages:
10) Creating the whole plot in my mind and anticipating everything. Before I left, I felt like I was this free- no strings attached agent who wanted to go explore a new part of myself and live everything to the fullest. I was finally going to start life.
11) Not counting on the Plot twists. Paths are rarely linear, and most time they have more to do with our minds that with external factors. My twist came from not understanding that in order to live in a new place and create a life in it, I first had to work hard on myself.
12) Stopping to fight for my values. Losing your personality to please the environment can take the life out of you. I stopped acting towards my values and lost myself in the process.
13) Reaching the dramatic point of ‘’Who am I?’’. Although my body was there, my identity wasn’t. Because there was no identity. I was passing through this awful period where I didn’t know how to identify as a person, as a friend, as a loved one, much less as an architect. My self-doubts kept creeping in, and they had the power to control everything I did.
The Breaking point
I then reached the moment when this troubled chain crashed into a wall. After I left Milan I found I was actually creative. I was creative in finding new ways to justify what had happened: ‘’you know how it is… It wasn't great but at least I learned what I don’t want to do. That’s as important, right?’’. I gave so many justifications that they ended up justifying my own doubts. I went back home, took a month to ‘’regroup’’ and decided to put a blanket over everything and start looking for a new job. 1 month turned into 4 and I still couldn’t find anything. I went through months of interviews and false hope, and every time I got a no, my already fragile self-confidence would reach the minus level. And still, I pushed through, without thinking of how depressed I was actually beginning to feel. Everything translated into:
14) Not knowing where to go or what to do
15) Being profoundly stressed and frustrated
16) Feeling like I was being useless to society
17) Felling the pressure from every front, from society to my closest people
How to get through it
Solutions may come in different ways, but they will always depend on how persistent our mind is to look for answers.
On this January, I received an email to sign up for a Career Change Accelerator in London. I took the chance and applied to it without even knowing what it was. I left in 3 weeks.
It has been a month since I arrived in London, and I found more about myself in this month than I have in a long, long time. It is not even about changing my career path, but about how much I am discovering about what I want out of life. With longevity and perspective came a few realizations:
18) I understood that my problem was a generational one. I did a rewind of the past months, of the conversations I had with my 25-year-old friends. Those talks were always about discontent: how everyone is over their jobs, of how most days suck, that very few are happy with their conditions, how relationships are going through difficult phases, that most days have no free time… There was this quarter of life crisis that seemed to be spreading into everyone.
19) I had to let go of their problems in order to focus on mine. While trying to be a good friend and empathic towards everyone I was also absorbing this weird energy. I was not able to separate myself from those problems. In fact, I was focusing so much on how ‘’we’’ could solve them that I stopped having the space to solve my own.
20) There’s a persistent sense of chronic dissatisfaction that affects my generation. We are so used to easy access to everything that we stop feeling satisfied with what we achieve. We want more and more to a point that makes us obsessed.
So how did I dissociate myself from it?
21) I understood that leaving is not a miracle cure, but leaving with a mind that wants to heal itself may be the start of something. I left my environment in order to restart and contrary to what happened last year, this year I finally felt like my mind was in the right place to actually start solving my identity crisis.
22) I answered the tough questions: ‘’What is really important to you’’, ‘’What is your life view?’’, ‘’What is your work view?’’, and so on.
23) I focused on the process and accepted it. It’s full of highs and lows, and that combination is what allows me to self-solve my problems.
24) I became completely honest and vulnerable with myself. That’s what has been guiding me to learn about my skills, my emotions and what I want out of life. How by writing lists of do’s and don’ts and likes and dislikes, I am able to start questioning what the next steps can be for me.
25) I bared myself from the pressure. The pressure that comes from society and even from the people who are closer to us and ‘’only want what’s best for us’’.
What’s the conclusion?
My 25 steps to manage my 25-year-old crisis got me to a stage where I’m finally able to decentralize the labels that were projected on me. I am not thinking about being the friend, daughter, sister, or employee. I am thinking about being whichever part of me is possible to be at 25. I’m not worried about who I’ll be in 5 or 10 years, I’m focusing or being the best, most fulfilled I can right now.
My point in writing this is not to say that every 25-year-old needs to leave in order to solve themselves. But if I could give some advice, I would say to:
A) Find the time and space to learn how to be an individual identity in our society. That space might come in different ways: from meditation to writing a diary to letting go of the daily adrenaline while training hard.
B) Put everything into perspective. No matter how time and space come, use it with conscience.
C) Stop dramatizing. We are not going to solve ourselves forever, but we can learn how to be one of the many versions of ourselves for now.
D) Create mechanisms to cope with who we are right now, what are our goals and how can we achieve them. The crisis will eventually start to leave our minds, opening them to a more stable mind set.
E) Finally, be bold and creative. Accept that we all have tons of layers, be original to express them.
