You: The Most Important Person You’ll Ever Meet

My generation has invented and perfected the quarter-life crisis. We are collectively panicking younger and younger about our futures and our expectations. After all, we are under more pressure than ever to have successful careers without neglecting the things we’re passionate about, to be “at the right place” in our social and romantic endeavors according to the “life plans” many of us imagined for ourselves, and we’re expected to achieve this while paying off student loans, living in a struggling economy, and maintaining the sparkling social life we brag about on Facebook.

Not surprisingly, this proves difficult for many people. However, the biggest obstacle for those of us preparing for the rest of our lives is not knowing specifically what we want out of life. This leads us to second guess our choices, question our paths, feel like we’re wasting precious time, and worry ceaselessly about the future. Regularly evaluating your life is a good habit to get into to prevent falling into a lull, but constant anxiety is bad for your health and not even remotely fun to be around. Luckily, there is help. To understand exactly what you want in life, you have to get to know yourself honestly. And here

are my favorite ways to do so.

         Travel

Traveling doesn’t just take you out of your time zone, it takes you out of your comfort zone, as well. The new sights and flavors that you experience add to your understanding of your personal preferences. But while travel should be mostly enjoyable, it’s the less pleasant aspects like being put into unfamiliar locations and uncomfortable situations that help quickly cut through all the niceties and get to the core of your nature. Suddenly, you realize that for all your independent (read: misanthropic) inclinations, you value having someone to come home to, even if it’s just a roommate. Maybe seeing the warm family atmosphere of a homestay makes you appreciate having your own family around. Or you could realize that the furiously bustling downtown lifestyle gets exhausting after a short while. It’s true that in moments of difficulty, when we are without a support system, we reveal our true nature, but it is also in moments of absolute freedom (or moments of wine), when we are alone in a country that doesn’t know us and has no expectations of us, that we can discover what we’re really like.

            Read

If you’re not quite ready to physically displace yourself, you could pick up a book and displace yourself mentally. A good book puts you deep inside the lives and minds of its characters. It immerses you in locations, situations, and circumstances that you’ve probably never been in. A good book allows you to “sample” different lifestyles and experiences. It stimulates your imagination and (oh, horror!) teaches you things without your realization. This gives you the tools to think about your life critically or at least from a new angle.  Finally, it invites you to compare your reasoning to that of the different characters. You’ll wonder whether you would have made the same choices and, if you’re honest in your rationalizations, you’ll learn so much about yourself.

            Reflect

This is definitely the easiest task on the list. Think about your favorite things in life: the moments when you feel the happiest, the music that moves you, the neighborhoods that lift your spirits, the friends and family that you admire. Think about your favorite hobbies as a child, or the activities that you find most fulfilling. Rummage through high school binders or old photographs. Rediscover the things that you had forgotten that could give you a clue where you want to go. See what you were best at. Now take the highlights of all these pieces and use them to build an idea of what you want out of life. Then, you can start thinking about the tangible goals it would take to achieve it and before you can say, “Where’s my inhaler?” life won’t be so anxiety-inducing.

Cleaning out an old closet, I found the long (and terribly ambitious) beginnings of a novel that I tried to write when I was about twelve. I was too young to have consciously decided to “write a novel” and I definitely had no idea what it means to be a writer, so this was simply an earnest attempt at self-expression, free of all the associations and pretensions that sometimes accompany such a task. And this small, dusty discovery lets me know that even before I started planning, doubting, re-planning, and questioning my future, a part of me always knew what I’d become.

Tatiana Sundeyeva has gotten into the terrible habit of thinking about everything. She enjoys travel, literature, puns, and anything that can be found in a bakery. And not necessarily in that order. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she got a degree in English with a minor in Italian.