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Graduation Ready, Set, GrowBy Rick Horowitz
She knows just what the problem is. "I'm having a quarter-life crisis," she says. They've never heard of such a thing -- not in those words, anyway. At least her sense of humor is still intact, they tell themselves. At least they think it is. Her voice, racing through the phone lines late in the evening (and the next evening, and the next evening), is still reasonably strong, reasonably composed. But her eye, they can tell, is on the calendar, and what she sees there is causing her no end of trepidation: just a few weeks left before she graduates from college. Before she's officially, indisputably... On Her Own. She's in no rush. And she's not the only one, she says. "Everybody I know is going through exactly the same thing," she tells them. "We're all totally unprepared for this!" "This" being the real world. "This" being adulthood. "A quarter-life crisis is much harder than a midlife crisis," she informs them. "You can just move to Tahiti and start an ant farm if you want to." They had never considered moving to Tahiti. Or starting an ant farm. They resist the urge to point out all the reasons why it's at least as difficult to make those kind of great life leaps later on, once you're established, settled, connected, stuck. Instead, they listen. This conversation isn't about them, or about people their age. It's about her, about people her age. About people just starting out and understandably panicked at the prospect. "We've been in school all our lives," she reminds them -- as if the tuition bills weren't reminder enough. "Everybody did everything for us. Now we have to make all these decisions!" Decisions like where to live. She's fallen in love with the Big City, and she wants to stay there. She'd rather live in the very heart of it than in one of the outlying areas. She also wants her own bedroom. She'd also like to have enough money left over -- when she's done sending in the monthly check for an apartment with her own bedroom in a relatively safe and relatively convenient Big City neighborhood, when she's done paying the broker's fee and the security deposit for that kind of apartment -- to buy a few groceries from time to time. Some shoes. Decisions. Decisions like where to work. "Everybody's telling me, 'Go for your dream job.' But in five weeks, I have to start paying the rent!" So how selective should she be? If she has a shot at a job that's almost-but-not-quite her dream job, should she hold out for something even better? What if it never shows up? Or what if the opening is nothing even close to her dream job? Should she pretend to be enthusiastic anyway? How will she feel about landing her first full-time employment under false pretenses? And what about the interviewer who wants to know what she sees herself doing five years from now? He doesn't want all the training they'll give her wasted if her dream job ever does come along. She hears him asking for a lifetime commitment. Who wants to make a lifetime commitment when life's just beginning? For that matter, who says she even knows what her dream job is? And who says it won't change once she gets out there and has the chance to wander down paths she's never even considered? Paths that might not even be on the maps yet. So many questions. So many decisions. They'd like to reach right through the receiver and hug her. Instead, they reassure her that it'll all work out, and that they'll be there for her no matter what. They remind her that she's been preparing for these decision days for years, and that she'll be ready for the big decisions, too, when the time comes. For now, it's time to hang up the phone and call it a night. She seems a bit calmer with her quarter-life crisis. They find themselves thinking about Tahiti. Posted 4/23/02. These
people sound like any people you know? Why not share the column with
them? The more refrigerator magnets, the better -- that's how Rick sees
it!
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Rick Horowitz
