I had my âmid-life crisisâ at 34. đš
At first, I didnât realize what it was, because if you look up âmid-life crisisâ, the internet tells you itâs a condition that âmay occur from the ages of 45-64.â
But when you look at the symptoms, itâs basically around:
having accomplished all your external goals like getting that job, buying that house, and having that family and youâre still not happy, or
being at a certain age in life and you feel like you havenât accomplished all that you have set out to.
I DEFINITELY felt elements of BOTH of these.
Despite achieving my goals of getting my PhD and a good-paying job at a great organization, I still wasnât happy. Furthermore, I thought that by this age I would be further along in life by being married and having at least one kid already. So, I remember thinking, âWow, most people feel this crisis in their 50s, and if Iâm already feeling this at 34, then I must be a SUPER failure!â
The thoughts that I was a failure, that I wasted my time making wrong decisions in life, and that I was now stuck dealing with the consequences haunted me for a few years.
Even though I eventually came to terms with the fact that I was making the best decision I could with the information I had at the time, and that time wasnât really wasted (it was for me to collect real data points about what made me happy or not), I still couldnât shake the nagging feeling that I still wasted my time somehow.
And this storyâthat I was someone who made wrong decisions, and someone who may waste time again with any new decision I madeâwas an emotional weight that kept me back from fully imagining a brighter future. It was a smudge in my lens preventing me from clearly seeing what was really possible for me. đ¶