Quarter Century Life Crisis

I turned 25 a few weeks ago and the best way to describe the time surrounding the silver anniversary of my birth, is a roller coaster ride. I've written about the difficulties I've had leaving my 6 week stay in California and coming back to Peru. Since I wrote last, things have improved over all, but I'm still having a lot of lows. At first when I started having these big swings of emotions, I felt out of control and really dumb for not being able to handle them after almost a year and a half in country. The weirdest part was that I was having a difficult time pin pointing exactly what was causing these swings. I turned to a lot of my friends back home, through email and skype, and have been in contact with lot's of close friends from high school and college.

What surprised me, is that practically everyone I talked to was having a similarly hard time with whatever it was they were tackling in their lives at this moment. This past September and October have been particularly hard on a lot of my friends. They are all dealing with different things, but the one thing we all have in common is our age. One friend put it nicely, she called it the Quarter Century Life Crisis. It may seem silly when you first hear it, but if you think about it, it makes sense. At 25 years of age, we feel like we should be full fledged adults. We've had a few years since college to fiddle around and try and figure out what we want to do. By 25 we are either supposed to have a good job or at least be on track to get it. But even for my friends that have the job they dreamed of in college, they are now second guessing if that's what they really want to spend the rest of their lives doing? All the sudden they feel like they are missing out on their twenties and have the urge to quit their amazing job and go wander the globe for a while. Then there are my friends who are wandering the globe and are freaked out that they are behind in life and they're not sure how to catch up.

I have friends who are dealing with break ups and deaths and reversely friends coping with marriages and having babies. It doesn't really matter how things are shaping up in a persons life, we thought things would be different. And even if things are exactly the way we planned them to be, we thought we would feel different. Our trial run as adults has us all reevaluating out lives and our situations.

For me, my life is pretty much where I had planned it to be. What has been scaring me lately, I think, is that I don't know where I'm going after my service wraps up in under 10 months. The world is literally at my feet. I can anything! But how do I choose? What direction do I start? The pull to go back home is strong, I love my friends and family. I love California. But the call of the rest of the world tempting. I try not to overwhelm myself with the question, what do I want to do with my life? Instead, I focus on a little bit at a time. What do I want to do with my life in the next 5 years? So far, I have about 50 ideas, 10 of them I'm seriously contemplating.

To all of my friends out there who are feeling a bit lost in the world, I ask you to stop comparing your lives to others. Almost all of my friends, when talking about the things they struggle with, have said to me they feel bad complaining because it's not like they live in a developing country like I do. They think just because they live in the US that these issues are easier to deal with then mine are. They are not. The Quarter Life Crisis knows no borders. And luckily, friendship doesn't either. So at least the silver lining in this whole crazy mess is that we are in it together.

Even though I am still having a hard time dealing with some stuff, I have definitely been doing a lot better overall. Going back to site after almost 2 months of being away was like finding the calm in the storm. Life is slow and easy going here. It doesn't matter what is happening in my life, the kids and girls are constant. They are always there and even if I disappear for 2 months, they will still love me when I come back. Life seems to make a little more sense at site then it did when I was on medical leave or freshly back in Peru and whisked to Piura for an IST. Life in Lima is anything but boring. Even after a year, I am discovering new things each week and meeting new people. I have a lot of things going for me right now. I am finally an experienced veteran who knows how to navigate her way through PC life in Peru. I am trying to ride this wave cause I know that soon I will be starting a new chapter in my life and will end up starting from scratch once again. So at least for now, it's comforting that I know what I will be doing with my life for the next 10 months.