I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

When I talk to the people I love these days, everyone seems to conjure the same word to describe how they’re feeling. A lot of people say they’re lonely and a lot of people say they’re scared but every single person tells me that they’re lost. Even the people who have jobs, who have apartments, even the people who did not pick up and move 3,000 miles and whose lives after graduating have ostensibly stayed the same. It is so strange to realize that I knew who I was four months ago but suddenly I don’t anymore. It is so strange to have gone through so much in the past few years and yet feel as emotionally stunted and bewildered and adrift as I was at 15.

The thing about college is that it’s such an unrealistic life experience that for four whole years it allows you to propagate the illusion that you know who you are. You meet new people, you buy new clothes, you try new drugs. You get drunk all the time and bruise your shins in alleyways and you fuck people you can’t bring yourself to love and you talk to ‘intellectual peers’ about really important topics like the inherent dangers of groupthink and The Way We Live Now. All of these things aid in forming a sense of self that is satisfyingly solid, at least compared to the ping pong nature of your high school self. College is about figuring out who you are, but I had no idea that image I worked four years to construct would be so easy to lose.

I am mad that no one warned me that being 22 would feel exactly the same as being 15. The only difference between who I was then and who I am now is that now problems are ‘real.’ Bad decisions have become emotionally expensive, and suddenly casual gestures have the power to unravel 10 years of closeness. I can’t stop unconsciously destroying things. I can’t stop consciously destroying people. I’m not 15 and so I can’t funnel my angst into outward physical expressions of nonconformity and I can’t blame my parents for anything anymore without seeming like an asshole.

Last night I tried to sit down and write a list of things I know about myself, qualities I possess that are so decidedly me that they’re inherently inarguable. I couldn’t formulate a single trait, because the truth is that while I’m one person today, I may feel like someone completely different tomorrow. I have become amorphous, an unnamable thing, and for someone who analyzes and ties words to meanings as frequently as I do, this is a very difficult idea with which to come to terms. I’ve always been so attracted to truisms. I am intent to know very specifically what I am and what I am not. But right now my life is so untethered and in flux that I can’t seem to figure any of that out. I know who I was and to some extent I even know who I want to be, but right now, in this moment, I have no idea who I am. It’s very hard to figure out what it is you want when you don’t understand who you are. It’s very difficult to connect with people when you’re unsure of how it is you should be connecting.

Sometimes I force myself to remember that I am supposed to feel this way. I am too hard on myself, and so not only do I feel confused and sad but I also feel angry at myself for feeling like this, because I’m pretty sure ‘quarter-life crisis’ is the very definition of a first world problem. The trouble is how easy it is to forget that feeling like a bumbling, hormonal brat is totally normal for 22, and judging from the overwhelming amount of trend pieces on millennial malcontent these days, it seems I am (we are) not alone.

But despite what you may read in these articles, I really do think that twentysomethings have always felt this lost. Perhaps this confusion used to last for shorter amounts of time because we settled down at younger ages, but that seed has always been there, blossoming slowly and breeding self-doubt and overanalysis and the looming, impossibly terrifying realization that this is the rest of your life. I’m not sure twentysomethings today have it harder, but I do think that our confusion is more acute. We’ve grown up in a society that is totally wedded to psychology, taught how to analyze our actions and feelings from a very early age. We’re constantly watching ourselves, judging, taking mental notes. We know how we are–the ways we act, the ways we react–but we don’t know who we are.

There is some comfort in knowing that this is a collective problem, some sense of camaraderie in understanding that we are all feeling alone together. Maybe we just need to learn to accept that we’re going to be lost for a little while, and that that’s okay. After the hyper-planned lives we’ve lead for the past 22 years, maybe we owe ourselves that.

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