The Crisis Years

Whoever said that your twenties are the best years of your life was a big fat liar. If these really are the best years, then I might as well stop living when I turn 30. The twenties are the years when your ideals are shattered, you find yourself moving back in with your parents because you can’t afford to pay rent, and you ask yourself, how the hell did I get here?

If you are one of those independently wealthy people who didn’t have to work your way through university and was offered a $50,000 annual salary job right after graduation because your daddy knows someone who knows someone, then I’m not talking to you. In fact, I don’t even like you. No, this is for all those people who had high hopes for a brilliant start to life out on their own, for those idealistic ones who thought the world was theirs to conquer and have instead fallen flat on their faces.

I am 25 years old and one of those unfortunate college graduates who have had to move back in with their parents. And not because I couldn’t find a job after graduation, but because I decided to do the crazy thing and move to Spain. If I had done my homework before moving, I maybe wouldn’t have chosen to live in Andalucia per se. Not only are salaries really low (the average is 1.000€ per month), but the job market isn’t great, especially now with this seemingly endless economic crisis.

But my parents had moved to southern Spain a few months before I graduated from university and it seemed like the perfect place to start fresh. I had this glamorous notion of getting a job at a UN-related NGO, renting a charming old apartment in Málaga’s historic district and buying myself a Mini to speed down the coastal highway on Sundays. How much more European can you get? It was only after I arrived and started job hunting that I realized how unrealistic my ideas were.

After two months of job searching, I landed a job at one of the airport’s many car-rental desks. But of course I got the job with the local car rental company that was still stuck in the Middle Ages when it came to doing business. I worked there for two and a half years and it was such a bad experience that I don’t even want to talk about it. But it did serve to thicken my skin and bring a greater appreciation for my youth. Seeing the resignation in the eyes of my middle-aged colleagues, knowing that this job was all they had, made me feel so blessed to still have options open to me.

I am a bit of a commitment phobic and I get nervous when the choices I make start closing in on me, leaving me little room for escape. But then I think about all the things that I could do during my lifetime if only I would commit myself to something and see it through all the way, no matter what the outcome was. Because the truth is, even though the twenties are crisis years, they are the foundation upon which we build the rest of our lives. These are the years to take risks and make mistakes. If we play it safe now, we’ll regret it later and perhaps make rash decisions that will be harder to get out of as we grow older.

Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” The decade that follows college graduation is one full of questions, shattered ideals, financial imbalance, and oftentimes disillusionment. They are years of taking risks and picking ourselves up off the ground. Again. And again. But hope lies in the future, in what is not seen but imagined. And someday we’ll be able to look back at these crisis years and smile, knowing that in hindsight, life is just a series of decisive moments that eventually get us somewhere.

My grandfather said to me recently that it was during those personal desert times that he made the connections that would prove the most significant 10 years down the road. It could be a person he met or something he did or a thought he had, but he wouldn’t realize until much later how important that dry season was for him. Ironically, it is often in our barrenness that we bring forth the most fruit. But it takes time. Nothing happens overnight. So I say BRING IT ON. Crises never last and eventually we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. And no, it won’t be the light of an oncoming train. It really will be then end of the tunnel.