Thursday, November 7, 2013

When is My Big Break?

So. It's been a while.

I've gotta say, it's been an incredibly hard year and a few months since I moved to New York, and the bubble of lowlights and foiled attempts at success I've been living in have just not been conducive to musing about anything. I've been talking with a few close friends about adulthood, and that I just don't think I'm anywhere near it. Subsistence living, running in place professionally, and being stuck in a big city full of richos has me in a near state of arrested development, and it turns out I'm not alone.

At first I thought this was because of a lack of (trust) funds, especially in the form of my parents' help, but I have plenty of other friends who are fortunate enough to come from certain means but have found themselves in a similar emotional position. Then I thought it was just this damn city. And yeah, that is definitely part of it—the rent is too damn high, especially compared to my midwestern roots and life in Chicago only 18 months ago, and I do strongly feel like I'm bleeding money every time I leave my apartment. But that's not all of it.

In short, I think my despair, and that of some of my friends, is rooted in the fact that our cohort has been profoundly screwed over. Most especially the class of 2008, my class, who graduated the very same summer that the financial world was seemingly collapsing around us, has fallen into a sort of holding pattern from which it feels like we'll never recover. You'll notice I'm using a lot of qualifiers and subjective language, and it is on these conditionals that hinge the bulk of my fears. I am more than willing to allow that one's twenties are supposed to be hard, that these will be the hardest parts of our lives, that we're really "figuring out who we really are." But at this point, I'm 27, and I'm over it. I've learned my lesson; I've done my soul-searching. Where is the reward for all the nail-biting and tears and handwringing over missed bills and rising credit card debt and dignity lost in borrowing money from family yet again? I'm happy to look beyond this to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, but for some of us there is a real fear that it will never materialize.

All those months of economic uncertainty and hiring freezes represent a lot of lost time for the class of 2008 (and fine, 2009 too), and at times I don't see how we can recover. By the time companies slowly started hiring again, there were at least three classes of newly-graduated job seekers, meaning three times as much competition and a third as many excuses for lack of relevant experience. Sure, many individual hiring managers out there might understand that there was nothing we could have done besides take irrelevant jobs to make ends meet, leave the country, or rack up more debt going to school. But on the whole, we just don't look as good on paper. Even when I have made strides in my own professional career, I find myself plagued by an incredible case of impostor syndrome, and I'm constantly underselling myself.

More than five years after all of this, most of my friends have fortunately either found work or graduated from their programs, but there is a profound dissatisfaction or anxiety that I've been picking up from them and feeling myself stemming from officially reaching our late twenties. I'm 27 and will be 28 next month, but while my 30+ year old friends are buying houses, getting married, or even having kids (and some well-faring friends my age are admittedly doing the same), many of my friends from my graduating class are nowhere near that stage in their lives even if they want to be. How can I even think about raising a kid when I can't make rent? How would I fund a wedding when I can't find a steady job? Meanwhile, some of my younger friends have been struggling for what seems like the acceptable amount before landing their jobs and getting on with their lives and enjoying their early-mid twenties. The bigger things are easier to focus on when the smaller matters are taken care of, and vice versa.

I find myself most anxious that the anxiety will never end. I remember being an (albeit hyper-self-aware) angsty teenager and looking forward to being in my 20s when all these feelings and high school drama would finally subside. I want to look ahead to being 30 and knowing more than what I do now, chiefly that things will, on the whole, turn out alright. One thing I have figured out in my 20s is that there will always be problems. I will always find something to hate about my job, there will always be "first world problems." But the peace of mind that can come with a steady paycheck and food on the table is one that I hope will not be lost on me when I finally make it out of this.