I think I’m having some kind of early-20s time crisis, similar
to a man's mid-life crisis, but female and earlier. I have this desire to have time somehow
slow down.
My high school graduating class recently had a five-year reunion.
I didn’t go. I have one high school girlfriend who went to the reunion with her
boyfriend. Another girlfriend and ex-classmate went with her fiancee. I can’t
believe it has been five years since high school. I can remember commencement
like it was yesterday. It was outdoors. I wore blue slip-on shoes under the robe. My friend Jenny was sitting right in front of me during the ceremony and
I kept annoying her by reaching forward and playing with her hat. My favorite aunt
traveled to Chicago to be at my commencement, but she brought her dog and so
she had to stand behind the seated audience. When the dog began to bark, she
had to leave. She never saw me get my diploma. It’s scary to think all of that
took place over five years ago.
I have lived alone in my own little apartment for almost
three years now. During one of the first days I lived there a quarter dropped
off my kitchen table and fell to the floor under the table, an inch or so from
the wall. It’s in a place that I cannot reach with a vacuum. I have too much
stuff on the table to make moving it an easy task. My best option would be to
go under the table on my hands and knees. I’m poor, but not so poor as to
bother climbing under the table to get 25 cents. So the quarter still rests there
on the floor. And nearly three years later I still don’t feel like crawling
after it. Just this morning the quarter caught my eye as I was getting
breakfast. Has it really been lying under there for almost three years? Yes it
has, as hard as it is for me to believe.
I think the thing is; three years doesn’t seem like the same
span of time as it did when I was a small girl. When I was a girl, three years
was forever. Now it’s still a lot of time, but not forever. In a three year
span I went from being a high school junior, to having a brief college career,
to working full-time and living on my own. Heck, I’ve had the same quarter for nearly
three years. I’ll bet in three years that quarter will still be right where it
is now. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, three years isn’t so long, not anymore.
I have these same thoughts all the time. Granted I'm a few years older, but it's weird comparing where you are in life to where you thought you would be at that age. All of my best friends from college are either married or are in serious relationships that are on the verge of marriage. Admittedly, I can't help but feel a small semblance of pressure to kind of catch up to them, and to the romanticized version of the life I had envisioned for myself at 29. But I guess the thing I try to remember is that everyone grows up differently. It's normal to feel overwhelmed, or uneasy, or anything similar to that. I don't really know where I'm going with this, and I'm pretty sure I just turned this comment into my own personal blog. Just wanted to say that I understand what you're talking about
ReplyDeleteVert,
ReplyDeleteI want my five year-old thoughts to seem like they are five years old, not five MINUTES old. I need time to slow down for a while and let me catch up. :)
I know, but I think that's just how life is going to feel for a while. One of my professors in college said something that I'll always remember. He said "when you leave here, the real world is going to grab you by the hair and start running. If you don't run with it, you'll never catch up." Personally, I hate it. But at the same time, it doesn't allow you to feel complacency and keeps pushing you to adapt to new situations.
DeleteI'd have to kick the real world in the nuts and say "don't do that."
DeleteThe "quarter-life crisis" phenomenon has been gaining more exposure in recent years so you are definitely not alone! There is some more info in this article.
ReplyDeleteI have also thought about why is seems that time speeds up as we get older and there are a few popular schools of thought as to why this occurs. "Proportional theory" suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. That is to say, one year of your life when you are ten constitutes 10% of your life to that point versus one year of your life when you are twenty which constitutes 5% of your life to that point.
Another theory is the "biological theory" which postulates that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children's hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks ‘cover' more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they're moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time - after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock's point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours' time against a normal clock.
Bryan, that is interesting. I've always felt time is relative, it is why if you are standing in line or stuck in traffic that time seems to stand still but while we look back on some events they seemed to happened just yesterday when in fact they happened years ago and simply feels like time is just flying by. Time as a whole is very egocentric, although it can be measured few people refer to time as any other way but from their viewpoint.
DeleteAs far as a quarter-life crisis goes, I may not be well on my way to having a family but I'm in no rush to do it just to do it either. I don't let my friends and family positions in life get me down, I get to enjoy seeing their kids grow up and not have the huge responsibility of having my own now.
A year seems like it goes by much more quickly than a year when I was a girl, but whenever I'm in a hurry and waiting for a traffic light to change, time travels as slowly as ever.
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