Quarter-Life Crisis – Part 2/3

I’ve come to believe that feeling compelled to do something is one of the worst possible ways to feel. The problem with compulsion is that it leaves no room for desire. It carries with it a deep sense of urgency and yokes itself around a person’s neck like a heavy burden—weighty, incapacitating, and ever-present. A person who feels compelled to wash her hands 17 times before leaving the bathroom doesn’t do it because she wants to—she does it because she needs to. There is no choice or freedom in the matter—if she wants to carry on with her day, her life, she has to wash her hands 17 times. And don’t forget about the guilt associated with compulsion or, more specifically, not satisfying a compulsion.

When I was about fifteen years old, I read Last Waltz in Santiago, a book of poetry about post-Allende Chile in the 1970s. I read What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky and I got my hands on other books from the university library that certainly weren’t recommended reading for my high school civics classes and I sat on the floor of my bedroom, leaned up against my closet door, reading and crying. My childhood best friends were two sisters—refugees from El Salvador. As a child, I’d known that there was a war in El Salvador and that was why our church and my parents had helped their family come to America, but other than a few whispered stories overheard here and there, I knew little else. In these books, I read stories about entire families beheaded at the kitchen table, heads placed in their laps, left at the table as a lesson to guerilla husbands and fathers.  I realized how much there was to learn about the world and how much I would never know or understand, regardless of how much I learned.

And I felt compelled.

To do what, I wasn’t exactly sure. To fix the world, I suppose.

I went to college with the ambition of majoring in Spanish and International Studies, so that I could then go to graduate school for a Master’s in Public Administration. I wanted to work for a non-profit organization. And I wanted to start fixing some of those problems in the world that were most dear to me

I feel both blessed and cursed to have had parents whose livelihoods and actions exposed me to the imperfections of this world and led me to believe that chipping away at these problems was indeed possible—a father who had spent his entire adult life developing and working for a non-profit that provided housing to low-income families and a mother whose heart is bigger than the sun. They never hesitated to help those who needed it and without ever explicitly saying so, they raised us to believe in helping others less fortunate than we were. Countless times I sat in the corner of a room while my father spoke about the Appalachian region, its people, and its historical poverty to college students who were spending their “alternative spring break” volunteering for Frontier Housing. The students soaked up his every slow, careful word and I sat nearby, proud that he was my father. His thoughtful reflections of this region—his adopted home and my birthplace—and the people he’d spent his entire adult life serving taught me not to judge. My mother began to learn Spanish just so she could communicate with the mother of my El Salvadoran best friends and in time, she began teaching English lessons after church to Mexican immigrants. She picked them up for church on Sundays and drove them back home again, she went to doctor’s appointments and translated for them, but more than anything, she became a real friend to many people living in a foreign, often unforgiving place with few other friends. While other people poked fun at “hillbillies” and immigrants and mocked their poverty, mannerisms, and speech, my parents quietly and unpretentiously did the exact opposite by welcoming stranger after stranger into our home and giving their time, hard work, and friendship to those who needed it. 

While most of the time I feel overwhelmingly lucky to have grown up with such generous parents, sometimes, in my most selfish of moments, I find myself wishing that I’d grown up blissfully ignorant of the world’s problems, unaware of civil wars in far away countries and inexplicable poverty all around the world. Most days I don’t actually wish for that, but there have certainly been many days when the painful, gnawing need I have to do something feels like more than I can handle. 

There have been times in my life when I’ve allowed myself to get distracted from those nagging compulsions—a less-than-socially-justice-minded boyfriend tugged me in the direction of light and easy suburban bliss for several years and I changed my major from International Studies to English my sophomore year in college and decided to become “just” an English teacher. But ultimately, I always come back to this place of heartache and wide-eyed idealism that keeps me up at night, shedding tears of frustration about the world’s problems, fretting about my own culpability in this mess.

The problem with feeling compelled to fix the world is that, not surprisingly, nothing ever feels like enough.

*** 

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned half-jokingly that she was fairly sure she was going through a quarter-life crisis. “Look it up!” she insisted. Symptoms apparently include dissatisfaction with life and crippling anxiety, among others, I’m sure.

While I certainly cannot claim to be dissatisfied with my life, crippling anxiety is a feeling I’m not entirely unfamiliar with. Now that I find myself mid-Peace Corps service, I often find myself thinking about what exactly I’ll do when I finish this. As much as I (beyond) whole-heartedly love what I’m doing here in Ukraine, it still doesn’t feel like enough. Still I feel compelled to do more, to be more. What exactly that means, though, I haven’t figured out yet.

Running away some of this frustration a couple weeks ago, I started thinking about what my friend had said about her quarter-life crisis. When she first mentioned it, I hadn’t taken it very seriously. I’ll admit—I even laughed a little bit to myself as I jogged along my favorite dirt road. I casually thought to myself, “Well, it’s not even a quarter-life crisis…the average life expectancy for an American woman is something like 80…and that means we’ve already lived a third of our lives…so it’s more like a 1/3 life crisis.”

And that, my friends, is when the panic unexpectedly set in…the crippling anxiety and dissatisfaction with life. Not because I’m unhappy with my life, but because I just don’t know where to go next or what to do. If I’m lucky enough to live until I’m 80.8 years old, then I’m currently enjoying the last months of the first one-third of my life. I’m dissatisfied with what I’ve done so far, even though I know that if I were to look objectively at things, I’d be forced to admit that I’ve accomplished plenty. Still though, all of a sudden things seemed to matter so much more. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the second third will be the one that counts—the real, substantive part of my life—the meat between two slices of bread.

Recently, in a fit of melodrama, I wailed to my mother that I had no time to spare, that I needed to get cracking if I wanted to do something with that second third. She laughed at my exaggerated tale of woe and eventually our conversation turned to something else, but that ever-nagging and now more-present-than-usual compulsion to fix the world has continued to lurk closer to the surface of my sub-conscience lately.

My dad, quiet in his usual way, while I made exaggerated claims to my mother about having done nothing with my life so far, sent me an e-mail the day after Thanksgiving in an effort to make sure I wasn’t actually going to have a panic attack about this whole third-life crisis thing. He included one of his favorite sayings, part of which I’ve copied below.

When the time of our particular sunset comes
Our thing, our accomplishment
Won’t really matter
A great deal.
But the clarity and care
With which we have loved others
Will speak with vitality
Of the great gift of life
We have been for each other.

Reading those words really calmed me down. It seems that every time I endure a particularly trying period of frustration with the giant problems of the world and my own tiny sphere of influence within it, something brings me back down to a human level that reminds me to get a grip on things. The best I can do is love as much as I possibly can. Again and again, when I have these moments of almost inconsolable panic about the world, something—a poem, a message from a stranger or a friend, reminds me to come back to humanity—the thing that I want to believe in the most.

On the worst of days, I’m emptied to the core with a deep sadness about hunger, poverty, war, and the sorry state of our world. My compulsion to do something and the obstacles in my way eat away at my faith and optimism and leave me aching and void.

But on the best of days, I am so full of love that I swear I can physically feel it overflow and course through my veins. And so to me, it only makes sense that love fills the void that compulsion and sorrow leave in their wake. What else could ever possibly be enough, other than a deep, equally consuming love for humanity — a clear and caring love for others? And then the panic subsides when, in so many ways, time and time again, I’m reminded that this is more than enough.