Christensen: Don’t shy away from crisis

Having a midlife crisis at 20 doesn’t bode well for longevity, but over break I certainly felt… Having a midlife crisis at 20 doesn’t bode well for longevity, but over break I certainly felt like I was halfway through and going nowhere.

After the stress of final papers, projects and tests ended, I went home expecting to have a chill couple of weeks, bathing in the glow of cable TV and heavy comfort foods. What I actually experienced was more like being trapped in the 6-inch space of my own head. Instead of stressing about a paper I could turn in Wednesday and forget about, I was stressing about my life — things that I couldn’t work on immediately.

I think once we get to college, we expect the scary questions we faced in high school, such as “What schools are you applying to?” or “What do you want to study?” will gradually die out. I expected that no one would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up anymore, and I was glad for it. And yes, once I got to school, most people stopped asking me how I planned on spending my life. But over break, I realized I was starting to ask myself what I wanted to do with my degree, once I have it.

Being on the cusp of graduating from high school was scary, but I got a lot of solace from the fact that I could still hide in school for another four years or so. I wasn’t getting old yet, and there was still a lot of time to sort out how I wanted to spend my academic years. Over break, I realized that I don’t have a lot of time left. And how have I spent the past few years? Have I taken enough internships? Why didn’t I study abroad for a semester? Should I study abroad now? I didn’t have papers to stress over, but I felt like I should be stressed about something. So I chose to stress about myself.

Of course, what I — and presumably a lot of you — are experiencing is a quarter-life, rather than a midlife, crisis. It can last for a long time — into our thirties, according to an article in The Telegraph. We’re in crisis financially, either because we have a lot of debt or because we still depend on our parents for living expenses, even though we would rather be independent. We’re in crisis because we’re worried about having a successful career — or, in my case, worried about what I’m going to do when I actually have to get up and go to a steady job every single day. We’re also in crisis over relationships, according to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. In the “intimacy versus isolation stage,” we’re worrying about our ability to form lasting relationships. The “isolation” part comes from fear of rejection and pain. Basically, Erikson says that if we cannot form intimate relationships because of our own needs or our inability to like ourselves, we feel a sense of isolation.

My little bit of layperson psychological research didn’t immediately make me feel a whole lot better, and Erikson even made me feel like a little bit of an underdeveloped social pariah.

I looked onward, toward Erikson’s description of middle adulthood. Essentially, it seems like being a grown-up might be a whole lot sweeter than where we are now. According to Erikson, the “central tasks” of being an adult include lots of pleasant sounding things, such as “developing unity with a mate” and “expressing love through more than sexual contacts,” and even “being proud of accomplishments of self.”

Of course, it’s probably a little juvenile to think that life will have a golden age. If I get to middle age it doesn’t mean that I won’t miss being young, won’t miss coming home to sit on my parents’ couch, watching “Intervention” and slowly freaking out over my life direction. I guess the point is that all of us in college are still pretty young “young adults,” and maybe everything we’re feeling now is exactly what we’re meant to be feeling. Maybe the crises means we’re on track, in some twisted way. Better to ask questions and doubt yourself than blaze blindly ahead into the future. I think that the phrase “everything happens for a reason” is probably one of the least comforting phrases ever, but I suppose that’s more or less what I’m trying to say. It’s not preordination or destiny or anything as airy as that. Crisis is just a part of the way life steadily unfolds.