I’ve been reading the It Gets Better book this week and it really struck a chord with me. If you aren’t familiar with the project, columnist Dan Savage started it after last years rash of publicized gay teen suicides. He wanted a way to reach out to those teenagers who were unable to see what their lives could be after they escaped the bullying and the homophobia of their middle and high schools. It began with him and his boyfriend in America, husband in Canada making a video about how much better their lives had gotten. After only a few hours on YouTube, there were hundreds of other videos from gay and straight people alike letting those kids know that, they may not be able to see it now, but life gets better.
I thought about my Quarterlife Crisis. It was a time where I really couldn’t see that things were going to get better. I was lost and depressed and didn’t see how anyone else could understand what I was going through. It wasn’t until I found a few friends who were in the same situation that we realized that we weren’t alone. The bullying I felt during that time was all internal. I told myself I was worthless, and lazy, and unmotivated. I told myself I was never going to achieve anything and that my life to that point had been a waste.
Meeting the people I have through this website and others like it, I was able to build a support system. I didn’t have people who had gone through it telling me it gets better, but I found people who were able to help me believe that one day it would get better for all of us. And one day, it happened. It wasn’t as though there was some miracle change that made it all better. Making your Quarterlife Crisis go away is a matter of many baby steps.
One of the symptoms of the Crisis is finding out that the path you’ve been on may not be the right one for you. It leads to a feeling of confusion and an inability to move forward. I stayed in that place for two years. I tried a lot of things in those two years to attempt happiness, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in business school that I really started to get better. It wasn’t that I was even particularly interested in business or wanted an MBA, but I wanted to be working on something, anything, that could feel like bettering myself.
It starts with one step: A part time job in a bookstore or a volunteer opportunity on the weekends or joining a choral group on Tuesday nights. It means failing at more and more things until one thing fits what you’re looking for. It takes redefining yourself and realizing that just because this first path didn’t work out doesn’t mean you’re a failure. In fact, it means you may know yourself better than most people out there.
For those in the Quarterlife Crisis, it does get better. But you have to be responsible for making it better. And that isn’t a task that comes easily when you’re gripped with fear. And even when it gets better, there are still hurdles to overcome. Some days I feel that same feeling of dread and failure creeping into the back of my brain. Maybe I’m not doing things the way I should. Maybe I chose the wrong path. Maybe I’ll never amount to anything. But then I do something that reminds me how far I’ve come. I’ll go back to that volunteer opportunity, or read a book on economics, or dig through the recycled craft supplies at Goodwill in order to make art. You have to remember who you are and what makes you so amazing.
I realize that when it feels like everything you do is wrong it’s hard to take the advice to just do something. One of my favorite themes in the It Gets Better book is that it doesn’t actually get better. What happens is you get better. You become better able to handle the bad times, you have greater resources to use during those bad times, and you have the ability to change your life so that those things and people that were making you so miserable no longer have a grip on your life.
It does get better. We all have the ability to make it better. It’s not easy and it’s not pretty, but you’re also not alone. And in the end, not only does it get better, but WE get better.
