So, Now What?

03- Navigating Life's Pivotal Moments: A Journey Through My Midlife/Quarter-Life Crisis

• angela tam

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Navigating Midlife and Quarter-Life Crises: Personal Journeys and Insights

In this episode of the "So, Now What?" Podcast, we dive into the themes of quarter-life and midlife crises. I discuss how these crises can prompt significant changes in life, including shifts in routine, relationships, and self-identity. 

I share about the impact of being an adult child of asian immigrants and some barriers to self-discovery journey, such as norm matching, masking, and trying to live up to everyone else's expectations at the cost of my authenticity.

I explore common triggers for these crises, such as social media comparison, mortality awareness, and new health diagnoses. I talk about my struggles with the Evangelical Church, discovering my queer identity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and navigating a new-to-me label of ADHD (as a therapist!). 

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
00:57 Understanding Midlife and Quarter-Life Crises
06:50 Personal Experiences and Identity
09:53 Navigating Changes and Self-Discovery
11:50 Impact of COVID-19 and Realizations
15:06 ADHD and Personal Growth
24:35 Current Life and Professional Insights
27:08 Support and Conclusion

Come follow me on instagram @heyangelatam and my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you! 

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to the so Now, what? Podcast. This is your host, angela Tam, and I'm so grateful that you decided to tune in again and I really, really, really look forward to sharing this episode with you. This episode is about quarter life or midlife crisis, and I will share with you about my account of it and things that are really causing me to change. A lot of things that are going on in my life shift a lot of routines, relationships, and I want to share with you about how my identity and my experiences as an adult child of immigrants really impacts my self-discovery journey. So I just wanted to start off with what is one of the core elements of a midlife crisis, or quarter-life crisis For a lot of us.

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We hear about that person who is older, like of retirement age, that buys their Ferrari or goes and buys a vacation home and you've heard, okay, maybe they've always been so frugal, but now they're finally getting a chance to spend the money that they want and they're going to do it. They're going to buy this like sports car. They're going to divorce their partner and get a new partner and move somewhere else and change your life completely. That sometimes is not relatable and it's not really what, you know, everyone goes through. For a lot of the folks that I work with and in my own personal experience, we're having kids a lot later. Like, a lot of us are having kids in our 30s and it's either early 30s, which is kind of rare, mid 30s and late 30s is a lot of the times that we're having kids. So a lot of this stuff is kind of shifting when we're having our quarter life or midlife crisis. But the folks that I work with are experiencing quarter life crises, midlife crises in their 30s and 40s, and part of that means we're growing in our awareness of our aging mortality.

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We're really realizing and sometimes this is impacted through social media, for the better, for worse where we're seeing people show up in a very filtered and dreamy way and there's envy. So we're like, oh my gosh, this is what I want my life to be like. Why is my life not like that? The questions that are asked are who am I really? Is this all that there is to life? Is this all that there is to my job, my day-to-day routine, the daily grind and typical aspects of things that happen in the quarter or midlife crisis is that you re-evaluate all your roles, responsibilities. You question all your relationships, especially your most close relationships, like your marriage partner or your significant other, and you oftentimes can find yourself feeling disconnected to how you show up on the outside, to who you are on the inside. Sometimes this could get triggered by the death of a loved one, a divorce, finding a new health diagnosis or discovering your gender identity or sexuality is different than you grew up presenting to be, and then sometimes it gets stirred up when people are discovering oh wow, I'm neurodivergent and I never knew that before. That's something I'll share with my personal story later on, too.

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Some other things that people show up with that activates a midlife crisis or as a result of a crisis, is that they're burned out from their jobs and they were once very successful at it. They're looking for more creativity, more meaning, more impact, and there's a fear of starting over in their career or relationships. And sometimes these crises result in a divorce, a separation, but they're usually driven by wanting more intimacy, wanting more freedom, and they usually come with feelings of emptiness or anxiety or grief, and there's sometimes a search for something more authentic. I think that's the underlying theme is the search for authenticity, the self-discovery journey where a person really desires to have more of a connection with themselves and others, but they're questioning their version of reality because there's new data that shows them oh my gosh, my version of reality, what I thought was me, is really not me of reality, what I thought was me, is really not me. And how was I so off base to assume all my life and base my life based on this lens that I saw myself through? So I just wanted to share with you that I work a lot with folks with their midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call that, and what I've seen is that it can sometimes result in a lot of ruptures and separations and conflicts, but really I see it as an opportunity for folks to discover who they are and more about themselves and to have greater intimacy. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it results in a lot of heartbreak and a lot of heartache and isolation, because I know that some folks do it on their own and they don't have a lot of community to do that with. Some things that I wanted to share about was my own crises.

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I am 42 years old, so I'm a little bit older. In my 40s I had my kids relatively young. I had them in my early 30s and I had my private practice at the same time. I graduated from grad school in my late 20s. I used to be a part of the evangelical church and me and my husband met through a very conservative Christian organization, which we're no longer a part of and don't really subscribe to philosophy-wise. We met under those pretenses of being in a Christian marriage and we had different hopes and expectations at that time and how we wanted to live out our marriage and grow our family. And, as a result of coming back from grad school as well as moving to Seattle and going through creating my practice, my private practice, graduating from my master's program in Portland Rim in Portland In 2013, there was it was before the Trump administration started, but I just know the first Trump administration but I just noticed that I felt really different and I couldn't I couldn't put my finger finger on it.

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So I started to notice that I was questioning some of the values and tenets in the Christian church. Why aren't people in same-sex marriages present in leadership positions at the church? Or why aren't a lot of Black and Brown folks in leadership positions? Or why aren't their stories or their narratives really highlighted? Why is the face of the church really white? And why don't we talk a lot about how poverty is part of systemic, the result of systemic oppression and a failure of our systems, and not just an individual, a result of individual failures, individual bad choices?

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And so, for me, part of my self-discovery journey started after I had my first child and when I was in grad school and when I was noticing, okay, I'm the only person of color in this grad program and I was used as a part of their brochures and catalogs. I was tokenized and at that time I felt okay with it because I was getting a scholarship and everything. I felt like there was like a monetary trade-off and at the same time I was noticing, okay, this doesn't feel quite right. Fast forward to when Trump came into office, the first time. That really helped me to see that the evangelical church felt like such a betrayal to me. I think at that time I realized, wow, the evangelical church is not really for me, the American evangelical church and what the American evangelical church stood on stands on. Even the founders of the evangelical church were owned slaves and there was not a lot of talk about reparations in the church and how Black folks still are negatively impacted by church doctrines today and how queer bi-black folks don't really have a place in church. So for me I noticed a dissonance between what I believed in and my reality in front of me. At that time I did not realize that I was queer.

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It wasn't until I was in my COVID years, where everyone was forced to do a lockdown and we were all homeschooling our kids. I only had two kids at that time and they were much younger, gosh, I want to say eight and or seven and four. At that time I was in the thick of parenting, still doing the private practice on the side, and my husband was working fulltime at a non-profit. So stressed he was so stressed at his job. And I noticed I was like, okay, this is the first time I remember feeling so glad that I had a chance to work remote because my dream was to unschool my kids with the liberation lens and do my private practice telehealth. But at that time nobody was doing that. Nobody was doing telehealth until the pandemic came. So when the pandemic came, I found myself so relieved was doing telehealth until the pandemic came.

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So when the pandemic came, I found myself so relieved to do telehealth because it helped me juggle all my different roles and I was wondering why am to notice my friends are getting divorced, like my friends who are married, my girlfriends who are married to their cisgender husbands were getting divorced, and I had one friend that asked me Angela, who's, what's your type? What's your type in a person? Because they were discovering, they were going through their Bumble apps and Hinge apps and dating apps and really for the first time, discovering their types too. I was like I don't know, I don't even have a type. They were like you should go on TikTok to look for your type and I was like I don't got time for that and I didn't. It didn't, I didn't need to go on TikTok to discover, wow, I am.

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My attraction to men is still present, but it's a result of a lot of conditioning and I think, deep down, I just never gave myself a chance to discover that I am indeed very attracted to people of different genders and identities, and not just men. I think part of my conditioned attraction to men was about safety and matching expectations versus a genuine, authentic attraction. That's not to say that I don't love my husband or I'm not attracted to my husband, but I'm really noticing, as I'm unpacking, having a time to pause in the pandemic and to have more time to have conversations, to slow down. I'm discovering. Okay, like I am, I'm questioning all my realities. I'm questioning what I thought was true.

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The whole COVID thing, going to telehealth really impacted me and it really showed me how comfort was king for me and how I needed to reorient my life to practice comfort first. And I didn't realize that was an ADHD thing, because our nervous systems, they, process things in a different way. Adhd brains might feel a sense of sensory overwhelm quicker or might have a little bit more challenges organizing stimuli and the stimuli that comes in. This is not the same for everyone. Stimuli that comes in can feel like they're all coming in the same volume when in fact things are coming in at very different intensities, and a non-ADHD brain can really filter out the intensities and then deprioritize and prioritize them depending on importance. And for me I can't really do that. So whenever I walk into a room full of clutter, I cannot help myself but see everything as an emergency. I need to declutter this space. I need to organize it right away because, a I get overwhelmed pretty easily and, b I don't know how to prioritize. My brain doesn't know how to prioritize what's important.

Speaker 1:

So, anyways, that life, the slow life at home, and the invitation to be curious from my friends, really helped me to notice things that I took for granted before. So I used that opportunity and we made a decision during COVID to start unschooling our kids, which is what I wanted all along during COVID to start unschooling our kids, which is what I wanted all along and maybe that's for another episode of how I came to that conclusion of wanting to unschool my children. But during COVID it helped me to slow down and to really re-evaluate what is most important to me, especially if resources were all over the place at that stage, with toilet paper being in question and then my time and energy being stretched because I was switching over to being a full-time homeschooling parent while having a private practice on the side for telehealth therapy. And then, during COVID, we had a surprise third baby introduced into our family, and that has a whole another backstory too that I probably will talk about in another episode.

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But the third baby, how I like to share with folks and I've never really connected it to a midlife crisis for myself, but it definitely was a big part of my midlife crisis, was that my third baby caused me to reevaluate all my systems and processes that I had in place. So we maintained a pretty steady lifestyle with both of us working my husband working full-time and me working part-time. But once the third baby set in and the introduction of the idea of a third baby came in while I was pregnant, my husband and I had to reevaluate our capacities. At that time we were already pushed to our capacity, but I think we could have still continued in that vein, but it probably would have been really stressful. But the third baby coming into the picture, we were like hell. No, we can't continue to operate status quo. Something needs to shift because we are already eating into our margins with doing the unschooling thing.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, the third child helped us to be like what is really important to us and how do we prioritize it, and so with my, my husband had his own midlife crisis journey too, and I'm sure he'll come on the podcast to share about that. But for him, he discovered that he really needed to quit his job and he wanted to temporarily focus on some self-employment stuff that he was doing with real estate and wanting to be the primary parent in our family, homeschooling the kids and I in in turn would be the full-time working parent and it made so much sense because I really wanted to be more involved in my career but really never got a chance to fully invest. So that switch worked amazingly and it's still working amazingly because our kids are happy and my husband's somewhat happy, somewhat content, still pretty stressed, but in a different way, and it's rewarding in a different way for him. But anyways, that big switch to having a third child completely reorganized my life and helped me to actually move closer to my career and closer to really asking myself the question who am I really and what do I really want?

Speaker 1:

I discovered that I don't want to be the full-time working, full-time homeschooling parent, the primary parent. I don't want that. That actually really drains me because of my ADHD and how that shows up. And that doesn't mean I'm a failure. My ADHD one of the symptoms that the challenges that comes up is that we feel our feelings more intensely than non-ADHD years feel. The onset of those feelings comes quicker and the duration that it lasts lasts longer and the intensity is higher. So that results in what seems like emotional dysregulation, when in fact I see that as like a problem-oriented model of ADHD, but I see it as a challenge and I see it as an opportunity to really get to pivot and really get to create more of my life around my strengths, which is my creativity and my hyper-focus in my career.

Speaker 1:

So for me, I got diagnosed with ADHD, I think sometime last year and I'm 42 years old and, as a therapist, there are parts of me that felt really embarrassed, that I just did not see it before in my 30s and 20s. I just I know I don't fault myself for it 30s and 20s, I just I know I don't fault myself for it. But I think there's a part of me that's like dang, angela, you are a therapist and you couldn't even see it for yourself. That is embarrassing and I know that there's another voice that says wow, angela, you have been masking for a really long time and you have been matching norms, you've been doing a lot of impression management and you have role entrapment which all these concepts I will introduce and you are steeped into inheriting the stories and the burdens of your elders and, of course, you wouldn't even stop to think oh, I am not lazy, I just am wired differently. Oh, I am procrastinating a lot because I am struggling with big feelings related to perfectionism around my tasks, not because I can't do my task, but because I have a lot of. It's more about big feeling management.

Speaker 1:

I didn't realize that all these things were connected to ADHD, and there's so much more than I'm now noticing that is connected to ADHD. But I was steeped into really working hard to match expectations and live up to expectations that I did not realize that the expectations that I adopted are things that I've internalized and not my own, and so that conditioning of all the sheds, all the expectations that I was conditioned or expected to meet, were not mine. Conditioned or expected to me were not mine and they actually are very ableistic and capitalistic and patriarchal, and I had no idea about that. I had no idea that these things that I've internalized are things that actually are working against me and not for me. So this leads me to where I am today, which is that I'm 42 years old, I am in private practice and have a coaching practice as well.

Speaker 1:

I work with folks who are going through midlife crises or quarter life crises. In fact, I was on a phone call today with some folks who had self-identified as being in a quarterlife crisis, and that's so relatable. It's so relatable and I hope that if you are going through a quarter-life crisis, that you could see it as an opportunity for more intimacy and connection and some more self-compassion and self-acceptance and trust that you at the end of this and there's no end to the process of self-discovery. But I feel like midlife crises are an opportunity for us to finally get in touch with all the things, the parts of us that were suppressed or ignored or exiled because of all the internalized expectations. And finally, a lot of us. It's not a coincidence that a lot of us in our mid-lives 35 and up would find the time and the space to finally explore who they are. Because there's less. There's less dependency.

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Like when I was younger, I was dependent on my parents for financial support and stability. When I was in my 20s, I was dependent on my partner in some ways for financial stability. In some ways, I still feel dependent on the systems around me, but less so because I feel a little bit more capable and trusting that in my career and my financial situation which I know is a privilege to say and to have that I can do the self-discovery work, even if it means that I will discover things that will be very earth-shaking in my relationships. I know that at this point in my life I can basically start all over. If I needed to which I don't intend to I could burn it all down and it would be okay, and I know that's a privilege to say so. I really acknowledge that.

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And if you are going through a painful time where you are in your midlife crisis or quarter life crisis and you're like I have no friends, I have no one to reach out to, I have a lot of people around me that know this certain version of me that I put out, but people don't really know the real me. And I'm discovering a real me and I'm doing it in secret and I'm afraid that I won't be accepted. I just want to let you know that you can count on me. I don't even know you, but you can count on me to be on your side. You can count on me to have your back. And even if it's like the most heinous thing, the heinous to you that you'd find like, I just can't tell a soul about this.

Speaker 1:

I can't tell a soul that this is my obsession. I can't tell a soul that this is my fixation. I can't tell a soul that I'm discovering that I am queer but I've been married to someone who is of the opposite sex or a different gender and I just have this big attraction towards people who, you know, people don't expect that I would be attracted to. I just want to let you know that I support you and I'm here for you and no matter what age you are 17, 35, 68, I'm totally here for you and know that you have me on your side. You could text me and the text thing in the show notes, and I look forward to sharing a little bit more with you next time about my midlife crisis and other elements of midlife crises that might come up.

Speaker 1:

I am so glad you tuned in and I don't take that for granted. Please rate and review my podcast if you enjoy this episode and let me know what you think about it. Really, give me your feedback and I look forward to hearing about it. I will see y'all very, very soon in the next episode. Watch for it to drop. It will drop. I might not be totally consistent, but I will try to drop episodes when I can. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.