The Confidence Collection is back! There’s not a single person on the planet who hasn’t suffered a crisis of confidence at one point or another (TRUST us!). SO, we present The Confidence Collection, (click here for our previous editions!) brought to you by our pals at Caci. We’ll be covering all areas of self-belief in all areas of life – dating, work, relationships, beauty and personal growth – with practical advice, words of wisdom from women who have seen it, lived it and conquered it, and everything in between.
In this edition we delve into the new mid-life crisis and baby, she’s arriving in our late 20s and early 30s. WHY?! And what can we do about it?
Call it a quarter-life crisis or a Saturn Return or hell, just a ‘GAH I’M NOT WHERE I WANT TO BE IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW AND I’M PANICKING’ – for most women, there’s a time around your late 20s and early 30s where shit starts to get… really real.
Anyone who is older than 27-33 (the peak ‘f**k!’ years) will be reading this with a smug little smile, a nod of the head and an ‘ah, yes’, while simultaneously thinking, ‘my God, 27 was so young… why was I stressing so much!?’.
I look back on photos of my 27-year-old self and think, my God girl, you had it going ON. You never looked better – and spoiler alert, you never will again! Go out! Live your life! Wear the tiny clothes and do the big cut crease on your eyes because you’ll never get away with that again and wear the hell out of those skinny jeans because one, you’ll never fit into them again and two, even if you could you’ll get mauled by judgy Gen Z’s so it’s not worth it.
I was a size eight (sigh) ball of nerves, anxiety and insecurity, convinced I’d die alone, still renting a crappy Auckland hovel and would completely miss out on love and life and all the other good stuff.
I had no confidence, yet the mirror told me something different. Internally I was going through it. My living situation had crumbled, I’d gone through a terrible break up, I hated my job and I was broke. Quarter life crisis? You betcha. My personal to-do list (find a flat, stop crying over breakup, figure out what I wanted to do with my professional life) was so long and complicated that what I really needed – confidence – was so far down the list it was laughable to even try and find some.
A lot of my friends seemed to be going through similar stuff, weirdly, but what made me laugh was how we all dealt with it. Some chose marathons, others got really into smoking various meats (guys really need more hobby options) and I, to no-one’s surprise, chose what I’d like to call wine appreciation. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t have the confidence to try and seek it out, either.
For the gals in my life in the same camp, we all had the same fears. Those traditional markers of getting your shit together and being an adult – getting married or at least being in a stable relationship; buying a house; kids; ticking off bucket-list travel; progressing in a career and actually earning decent money – were so, so far away, so much more than what ‘society’ tells us where we should be. It’s both logistically and emotionally disorientating, confronting and terrifying.
It used to be that those in their 40s and 50s experienced a ‘mid-life crisis’ and did the whole marathon/ Porsche/ eat-pray-love thing, but these days, experts agree, more and more of us in our late 20s and 30s are experiencing legitimate crises of confidence, purpose and direction.
Says burnout therapist Sheena Schuy, “This existential crisis used to happen in the late 40s and early 50s when people would inevitably have everything they wanted but still felt a lack of meaning, purpose and poor mental health.”
Now, it’s a case of us actually either not being able to get what we wanted (cossie livs, am I right) or, as Sheena points out, it’s a matter of us questioning what we actually thought we wanted in the first place.
Those traditional markers of getting your shit together and being an adult – getting married or at least being in a stable relationship; buying a house; kids; ticking off bucket-list travel; progressing in a career and actually earning decent money – were so, so far away. It’s both logistically and emotionally disorientating, confronting and terrifying.
“I think what’s happening is we’re so privileged that we actually get a choice in this. If we don’t like our job, we can do something else. If we don’t want to have children, we don’t have to. And I think it’s a blessing and a curse, because on one hand, we still have some of those old-school societal pressures of buying a house, getting married and all of that, but at the same time, we’re one of the first generations where it’s not necessarily forced upon us.”
In short, it’s a bloody confusing time for millennials especially. So, how do we overcome this crisis of confidence and figure out what the hell we want?
First of all, a ‘quarter’ or ‘midlife’ crisis can actually be a GOOD thing because it does force you to examine what you actually want, and confront the things that aren’t working in your life. There’s a lot of thought around “embracing friction” – author Damon Stafford remarks that friction creates traction – meaning that not only dealing with, but welcoming the niggly times actually causes you to grow and progress.
Or, as one of my woo-woo friends told me at the time of my own crisis, ‘you now get to finally become the person you’re meant to be’.
I mean she was right, of course, as are all of the other cringy sayings *it’s darkest before the dawn!* *you need rain to see the rainbows!* etc etc. But embracing a life crisis? It takes guts, it takes work, it takes honesty – but there are big rewards at the end of it.
Change is inevitable – just a cursory glance in the mirror at my ripe age of 34 will confirm that to me, and if I’ve learnt anything in my time it’s fighting the inevitable, or trying to control the things I simply cannot control is a waste of time, effort and energy I just don’t have. (I mean thank God for Botox though, I’ll say that).
But how do you figure out what you want, and how do you find the confidence to make these big decisions?
Cognitive Processing Therapist Steph Coelho says that asking yourself the right questions is the first place to start – because a good decision is always going to be an informed one. Try some of these:
- What are my options?
- What are the pros and cons?
- How can I handle each outcome?
- How can I cope if the decision backfires?
- What am I giving up by making this decision?
- Will this decision impact my mental health?
- How will this decision impact the people around me?
- What if I fail – or what if I succeed?
Confidence can come from a place of assuredness – that gut feeling you have deep within yourself that tells you that you know you’re doing the right thing. But it can also come from knowing just how hard it is to take a risk and make a leap. She reckons you need to reflect often, ask and seek out support and, crucially, get used to the idea of failure, and cites psychologist Dr Morgan Levy’s thoughts on ‘radical acceptance’.
“Failure is inevitable, and it’s all about how we move through it,” she says, adding the idea that there is no failure, only lessons learned.
“Whether you are winning or losing, what are you learning?”
