Quarter Life Crisis

As I near my quarter-century birthday I have been prompted to re-evaluate my life.  This evening my housemate asked me the question, “do you ever just think your life is pointless and going nowhere?” And I replied, “yes, but I tell myself it’s because I’m young, and all the things I want will come with time.”

Is that true? I am now at an age where I am expected to be financially independent, and achieving my life goals! I must accept that I am no longer a student!

So I am making a list of things I want to have, or achieve, in my life, and thinking a bit more about how I can start to win a bit more at life.

E.g. I have always wanted to be a novelist.

How am I going about achieving this? By not writing a single thing in over 3 years.

Excellent.

E.g. 2. I have always wanted to get fit and healthy and STAY like that (this is the trick. I was very fit and healthy for me in 2004 and 2008…maybe 2012 will bring me fitness!).

I am failing to achieve this by going to the gym maybe once in 2 weeks. I do lots of swing dancing too, but I know this won’t really have a massive effect as I am lazy, and do it only a few times a week. And I am at a level where I now expend very limited energy when dancing.
Yesterday was a severe token gym day and today I can’t walk, so let’s leave that by the wayside right now.

 

E.g. 3. I want to be able to speak another language well, so other people think I’m cool for being bilingual. Also so that I am bilingual.

I am accidently improving my French at work, because we get daily influxes of horrible French teenagers. So I get a lot of practise saying things like “Please be quiet”, “please don’t take photographs here”, “Please calm down!”, “don’t touch that, it is a thousand years old!”, and all sorts of other exasperated things. But that’s going reasonably well.

Therefore this evening I am going to pick up “Harry Potter et la chamber des secrets” again. That’s learning right?

E.g. 4. I want a lovely man.

I automatically defend myself from all lovely men by letting them know (directly or indirectly) that I am rubbish at flirting, and psychologically damaged by previous horrible men, and then making terrible jokes all the time = friend zone. I must stop doing this.

E.g. 5. I want to spend lots of time with my family

I love my family greatly, and spend very very little time with them. I live 6 hours north of home, and hardly ever get back to see them. I know I will regret this in the future.

E.g. 6. Career?

That’s more of a plea to the universe that anything. I am pretty lucky to even have a job at the moment. Hopefully, after paying my dues to the heritage world in the world of front of house staff, I will eventually get a job organising others or doing something else… maybe events? That’d be cool.

E.g. 7. Be actually good at music!

I have a reasonable voice, piano, 2 guitars, violin and cello. And Kazoo. And I have to say the thing I have practised most recently is the Kazoo. Wrong. This I blame largely on facebook. My poor lovely instruments. I have a good grounding in all except the cello (which was bequeathed to me and I have yet to find a teacher and actually give it a go), but I do nothing with it. Badness.

There are many more examples of things I feel I should be doing. E.g. being financially independent of parental help somehow…

Basically I am making a new June resolution which is to live life to the full, get my world in order, take lots of opportunities, and get as much fun and enrichment out of life as I can. In the short term this will involve boring things like trying to get a rebate on overpaid tax, doing hard slog at the gym, writers’ block etc. But fingers are crossed that pay offs will be had.

And if all that fails maybe I can be a sleuthy lady solving murders all over the world and helping local police whilst trying to vindicate my various random friends and family members from murders they did not commit.