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| Illustration by: Laura Penny |
You have hit your mid-twenties. You can no longer party all night then go into work the next day, nor do you feel ready to spend your Saturday nights having dinner parties and drinking Prosecco. You have a job, a long term relationship, a flat in the city, but you still are left with the fear that arrives just as you’re falling asleep; the feeling that something is missing from your life. You distract yourself with notions to book a flight to a place you know nothing about, you then wonder if perhaps you should start saving for a mortgage, followed by the worry that perhaps your job isn’t for you, that maybe your boyfriend isn’t the one, that everything you believed was once perfect doesn’t make sense anymore. Each night these thoughts grow, they become so bulbous that you feel like you can’t breathe, that no one understands and that you’ll never feel happy again.
Ah, the wonders of a quarter life crisis.
I used to, and still do, get anxiety over the most trivial things. Once a month I would go into a bookshop to be stricken with panic that I will never get to read all the books I want to. To compensate I would read as much as possible until I realise I’m not living because I prefer being in Paris in the 1920’s instead of out with my friends. Next, I’d spend too many days in bed hungover, all because I decided to start saying “yes” to everything. Unsurprisingly, I would then get worried that I’m going out too much and that I need to be more cultural, so I’d stay in on a Friday night so I could wake up early to go to a gallery, only to become scared that the paintings I stared longingly at didn’t mean anything to me; that nothing is meaningful to me anymore.
Constant. Battles. In. My. Head.
My whole life felt like a Kafka novel. I would go to work, sleep, back to work, then try and sleep, distressed that I didn’t even know what I needed to make me happy. I thought it must be the travel bug. I hadn’t volunteered with elephants or travelled round India, or even had my picture taken whilst I looked out reminiscently to a crystal clear ocean. I thought I should want to have this. So, I gained a TEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) certificate and applied for jobs around the world. After lots of research, I chose to move to Hong Kong. There weren’t any nice beaches or elephants, but I did love Kung Fu films and Chinese food so felt I would be happy there.
Instead of an adventure, I saw it as a challenge; I wanted to show people that my boyfriend and I were strong enough to have a long distance relationship, and to prove to my boyfriend that I could live by myself and not rely on him. In hindsight though, I just needed to prove to myself that I didn’t need to ‘prove’ anything to anyone.
A few weeks before I was due to leave, my boyfriend went to a festival in America for a month and ‘found himself’ amongst an array of hallucinated hippies, and realised he needed to travel the world alone and that was that. Half of me wanted to run away to Hong Kong, but I couldn’t face being distraught in a city where I knew no one. Heartbroken, I cancelled my job application, and have since embarked on the dreaded move back to my mother’s house to take a break and really decide what I want.
Fortunately, my mum lives in the heart of the South Downs, so my first morning, I woke up early and went for a run. It was as if each step I took was squishing my unhappiness into the mud. I finally had time to just think. I became inspired and began writing the novel I’ve always wanted to write, and am now a quarter of the way through.
I still have days where I don’t leave my bed, where everything I write I hate, and I deem it acceptable to begin drinking at four o clock because the clocks went back and my body thinks it’s later. But, it’s these thoughts that make me appreciate the times when things start to slowly piece together, like the Family Secret in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
My thoughts drift from one idea to the next like clouds passing above. One day I want to be a teacher, the next an antiquarian bookseller. Some days I long to be back in London, others I dream of renting a cottage here by myself and getting a dog. All I really know, after painstakingly telling dozens of people I wasn’t going to Hong Kong anymore, after my relationship had failed, and I quit my job and I moved back home, is that it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It’s good to take time to reflect, to take a step back and see who you really are and focus on what you want from life.
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