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My Impatience with Patience

posted 28th July 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

With my internship ending and my time in Montreal rapidly coming to a close, I am asked on a near daily basis about my next step. My response is usually “My parents’ basement”.

They tend to think that I’m joking.

If only.

Yes, at the ripe old age of 29 and a half I am probably moving into my parent’s home, for at least a month, in the ultimate act of the boomerang child.

There are a couple of reasons for this.  Well, really, only one reason. Money. Being effectively unemployed for almost a year, a consequence of doing unpaid internships for my grad program, have left my cash supplies thin. This coupled with the fact that I have neither job nor prospects and the fact that I do want to move back to New York (where my parents live) makes moving home a logical act.

I am not overjoyed with this fact, and I’m sure my parents aren’t thrilled either, but reality is what it is.

What bugs me, more than the social stigma associated with moving home, is the general sense of uncertainty that dominates my life. I would be totally cool with moving home for the month of August, for example, if I knew that I would be moving out in September.  But I don’t know that. I don’t know that the graduate degree I’ve been working so diligently towards for the past two years will do anything to help me secure a job that pays enough to allow me to repay my ever burgeoning student loan debt, never mind one that I find intellectually and emotionally engaging.

And, after a long standing indifference to serious relationships (I used to view them as freedom inhibiting chains) I feel emotionally ready to be with “the one.” Could someone please tell him to show up, already?

The German poet Rainier Maria Rilke wrote to be patient with everything that remains unresolved in your heart, to love the uncertainty itself like books written in a foreign language, and that eventually we may, if we’re lucky live our way into an answer. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but as a member of the “do something” generation, patience isn’t a life skill I’ve developed -  I mean,  I’m the kind of person who reads three books simultaneously, while carrying on four separate chat conversations, and writing an essay for school- but clearly it’s something that the universe is trying to teach me.

I shoot off a fellowship application and I’m informed that I’ll hear back in two months. I e-mail a networking contact and I get an out-of-office reply informing me she’s out of the office for the next 3 weeks. The more I push, for certainty, the more my life falls apart. I’m like a bull in the world’s teeniest china shop leaving a trail of smashed porcelain with my every movement.

I find myself bickering with friends over the stupidest things, I demand answers before their time, I pray to God for favors with a timestamp, and my stress is beginning to manifest physically.  I’ve developed what I jokingly call my sexy eye twitch, reoccurring bouts of insomnia, and a shoulder tension so severe that they’ve begun creating a shooting numbness down my left arm (nope it’s not a stroke, but I may be pinching a nerve). I’m starting to worry that my impatience is going to kill me.

However, I’ve begun to realize that while I can’t change my circumstance, I can change how I react to things.

I’ve bitten the bullet and started meditating. I’ve begun filling the pages of my journal which had been gathering dust, and I’ve started working out regularly. I’m also making a concerted effort to do less, to worry less and to just accept how lucky I am: I still have money in my bank account, my health, and fantastic friends. In fact I’m writing this from a friend’s couch in Vermont having spent the weekend watching two very close friends who are very much in love get married.

The stress twitch isn’t gone and I’ve accepted that I’m paying for a massage to deal with the shoulder pain, but last night, for the first time in weeks I slept through the night. And that is progress.


photo credit: acdme

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Friends in Old Places

posted 21st July 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

There’s this sort of assumption that people in their twenties, as they age, change. But I think if you’re really lucky, as you get older you become more yourself.

When I look at the person I am now, in comparison to the person I was four years ago when I first began my crisis, I’m her, but I’m more her. Letting go, has allowed my true self to emerge and given me a degree of self-confidence I didn’t know was possible to possess.

For example, despite the fact that only 2% of women view themselves as beautiful, I love my body: no beauty magazine, no difficult bathing suit shopping session, no male friend’s admission that he, in fact, views me as too fat to date, can change the immutable fact that I know I’m beautiful.

Anyone who feels otherwise, or feels the need to tell me otherwise is not someone I have to or want to be around. It’s a weird kind of security that provides a bit of buffer from the ups and downs of the uncertainties I’m now facing: job hunting, relocating and rekindling old friendships.

I’ve also noticed it’s a trait that many of my friends who skated through their early to mid-twenties crisis free, lack. Armed with “perfect” jobs and “perfect” relationships they were never forced to take the time for self-reflection, and now looking at children and mortgages, some of them are starting to freak.

Not that this new self-awareness has all been roses and sunshine.

The trouble (and the beauty) is that neither my 16-year old self nor even my 22-year old self ever dreamed that my 29-year old self would think, act, or live the way I live. And although I adore the person that I am, it is taking time for me (never mind my friends and family) to make peace with this reality.

In a classic case of two steps forward one step back this means I’ve had to renegotiate the terms of old friendships. In doing so some have survived stronger than ever, some have transitioned firmly into the land of acquaintance, and some, such as my closest friend of 13 years became irreparably toxic and I was forced to walk away.

This, naturally, leads me to my newest source of worry (there always has to be something!). My transient lifestyle means that my friends have been deprived of me to varying degrees over the past four years and they’ve gotten quite good at living their lives without me, thanking you very much. I’m left wondering, sometimes, to what extent they “need” or miss me.

This is a feeling that’s heightened because so many of my relationships, at the moment are virtual: one unanswered e-mail or ignored instant message, particularly coupled with yet another job rejection (or worse total silence on the job front) can send me into a tail spin of funk that lasts for hours.

I start getting nervous that my reasoning for moving home –to be closer to my family and friends, even though it means fewer job prospects and much more competition is flawed: Is it worth moving back for friendships that may drift into acquaintance, or even worse, stranger territory when faced with the day-to-day reality of the person that I am versus the person I was?

I know that there’s no answer, I won’t know until I move home.

But still, sometimes, I worry.

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Setting Up a Home, Establishing a Life

posted 14th July 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

INTRODUCING KENDRA

Cresting the Quarterlife Crisis Wave…

Almost five years ago, I hit my Quarterlife Crisis at 25. Two and a half years out of undergrad, I was living in Brooklyn and working in corporate communications. I hated my job, which was neither intellectually challenging nor emotionally fulfilling, and I hated my social life, which revolved around drinking and eating out; a sedated form of Sex and the City.

Over and over again this line from Anne Taylor’s Back When We Were Grownups would play in my head: “Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person.”

I knew if I didn’t do something that woman would be me.

So I quit my job and moved to France where I spent seven months teaching English. When I returned to New York in the spring of 2006, I knew that it wouldn’t be for long. And it wasn’t.

In the fall of 2007 I moved north to a tiny grad school in Brattleboro, Vermont (population, 12,000), settling into a cabin located on 40 acres of forest in the town of Guilford (population 1,900). I was 8 miles from town, 13 miles from school, with neither a car nor a driver’s license (yes, I’m a total New Yorker). My two new roommates assured me that it would work out. It did. I eventually learned how to drive, how to stoke a woodstove, and how to be unafraid of the woodland creatures with which we shared our land.

After Vermont, I moved to DC and from DC to Montreal, which is where I’m currently living.

Personally, I’d say that the first wave of my Quarterlife Crisis came with the realization that the life I’d established for myself was not the one that I wanted, and that I needed to find a way to define myself outside of the confines of social and parental pressure. So I quit that life and spent my time trying new things. I embraced failure, I gave myself permission to walk away from things.  In the process, I figured out who I was and I gained a certain unflappable confidence that I don’t think I would have had otherwise.

Three months ago, however, I began to realize that I missed having friendships that weren’t held together by Skype, that I longed for neighbors who knew me by name, and for a room that was filled with more than can be crammed into a suitcase.

In effect I realized that it I was ready to sink in some roots, to set up a home. The realization feels scarier then when I first quit my job almost five years ago.

We talk a lot about surviving the pain and anguish of the Quarterlife Crisis, but we don’t talk a lot about how to end it. So I guess that’s what I’m here for; my crisis hasn’t ended but it has begun to wane. In a mere month and a half I’m moving back to New York for at least two years. It will be the longest that I’ve lived anywhere since 2005. And I’m nervous – I can move better than almost anyone; but do I know how to establish a life?

Am I really going to do this?

kendra-bio1

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