Spark, where art thou?

Identity crisis, here we come.

Credit: Erick Zajac on Unsplash

Welcome to Solicited Advice, our weekly column that celebrates the helpfulness in health. Because in a world where strangers at the grocery store love to tell you that a specific brand of magnesium will indeed “cure” what ails you (it probably won’t, so sorry), we’re all about passing on our lived experience in a way that makes your life a little better. Are we experts? Nah, not really. But we’re great listeners who have perfected the art of pillow screaming. Let’s get into it!

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Kat: I’m stealing the mic this week because I have a burning topic I need to talk about and, per usual, decided I’d treat the internet like a therapy session. So, welcome, please lounge on the velvet chaise I’ve provided to you both.

Ash: So weird how that just manifested here… but at least it’s cozy!

Jess: **hyperfocused on touching the velvet** 

Kat: I don’t feel like I’m in the middle of a full-blown life crisis, but I do feel like I’m very much grappling with the concept of rediscovering who I am and what I want from life. I’ve been so incredibly sick for the past year that I feel like I’ve just completely lost my identity, goals, hopes, dreams… you get the idea.

Ash: I can relate, but it’s actually coming from the opposite angle. I am feeling all those same things and feeling lost in a direction, but it’s because I have too many interests and my hand in a lot of jars simultaneously. It’s been really great for me in some regards, but it is taxing to be pulled in many directions and not feel like I have anything I’m aiming toward.

Jess: I’m somewhere in the middle of y’all — I haven’t had a lot of hopes and dreams and goals to begin with, and sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out, but I tend to follow my interest at any given time instead of having a larger plan. 

Kat: I think part of where I’m stuck is that I have two main loves, writing and editing, but I’m not well enough to dive into either of those at full speed like I’m used to. I have a few picture book manuscripts that are just waiting for me to revise them, but my brain turns into this loud voice that says, “But why? You don’t really have the energy to do any of this. So what then?” And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that pushing myself through it is not the answer this time around.

Jess: Is there something making you feel like you need to dive into them? What’s behind that feeling of needing to have an answer?

Kat: Whoa, Jess, therapize me why don’t you? My need is completely integral to who I am — and by no means a feeling influenced by external pressure. By nature I am very goal-oriented and driven, and I usually have something that, like Ash said, is a target I’m scooching toward. Without that internal compass, I find myself growing increasingly apathetic because small things are taking boatloads of energy. I want to feel excited by life again, ya know?

Ash: I get that — there are some days I question if I am physically able to follow through on the aspects certain paths demand of me. When I’m in a depressive episode, the last thing I want to do is plan a photoshoot, or create in any way despite it being the thing that fills me. I feel like I’m failing because I don’t have specific goals, but I’d also feel like I was failing if I did have some but I couldn’t meet them, regardless of the reason as to why. It means that, even if I enjoy the thing I’m doing, there’s no checkpoints to celebrate.

Kat: I think the checkpoints aspect is absolutely part of it. I love the feeling of accomplishment, and I want to feel that outside of managing my shit show of a body (wow, gotta work on that self-love thing everyone talks about). Jess, I’m so curious about your perspective because it’s really refreshing that goals don’t necessarily drive you. Do you ever feel like you’re “missing out”? Or has it helped you retain control of how you want life to be, not how everyone else is doing it?

Jess: I definitely sometimes feel like I’m missing something — mostly, the point. 😂 But I think the checkpoints aspect is interesting. I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment when I complete something, or if I do, it’s very fleeting and I’m on to the next thing. So that checkpoint doesn’t motivate me, which I guess might be why it also doesn’t interest me?

Kat: That makes a ton of sense. Ash, do you feel like you’re trying to create a life around how you like to spend your time or how you want to live most authentically like yourself?

Ash: I think it’s a bit of both. If I’m spending my time how I’d like to then that means I’m doing things for myself entirely. However, as much as I’d love to be immune to it, comparison culture is so real, and because some of my work requires the use of social media to be successful, it can be unavoidable to fall into the trappings of. It means even when I’m doing things just for me, I’m being bombarded with how to optimize it or seeing people doing what I’m doing but feeling like they’re leagues ahead of me even if we’re not actually playing the same game.

Jess: Yeah, that optimization game is a mindfuck. And I just realized while we’re having this conversation: I played that game for years because my singular aspiration for so long was “lose weight, be healthy, oh and also figure out how to be pretty” (because so many medical professionals gaslit me about my weight, and the whole growing-up-in-the-90s body image bullshit really fucked me up). So any time I set any kind of benchmarks or goals, it was around achieving those ultimate aspirations. Which means I never learned how to set goals outside of my body, and when I deconditioned from that white supremacist patriarchal bullshit — I didn’t really replace that aspiration with anything. Add that to the ADHD interest-based thing, and I… follow the path that feels good at any given time. Obviously there’s a lot more to that, and it’s extra hard when nothing “feels good” but that might need to be an essay exploration.

Kat: Whoa. My mind is… blown. I wonder if I’m sitting at the opposite end of things? If I was so conditioned to feel fulfillment through setting goals that without them specifically laid out for myself, I feel lost? Gen Z has made the concept of a “soft life” much more popularized, and I think about it a lot. Perhaps the deep, deep root of this is that I’m “simply” unhappy with how little time I have for anything outside of staying alive. Perhaps it’s grief. Maybe it’s (OK, fine, it is) a depressive episode manifesting in a way I’ve never felt before. Any last pieces of advice?

Ash: As my old sociology professor — who I’m still convinced is secretly Nick Fury — used to say, society is like having a hand on your face. The only way you can understand the impact it has on you is by taking the hand off your face and examining it for what it is. That’s all to say, when you’re looking toward your future, see if it’s the future you want for yourself, or the one society is telling you that you ought to have.

Jess: Your old sociology professor has a point. Now I guess the next identity crisis is, “What do I really want for myself”?

Kat: I guess we’ll just have to save that for our next group therapy session. Goodbye, velvet chaise! You were good to us! (And thank you both for being the literal best. #Blessed.)

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