The older we get, the more we lose our impulsivity. There are more people attached to our decisions, so they have to be made carefully. As a 20-year-old, I feel as though I have a mid-life crisis every other week. Questions of whether I chose the right major, whether I'm truly making an impact on the world, and where to go after college are always at the forefront. To cope with your personal anxieties, it helps to make a big change. I think this has to do with the New Year's effect where you do something monumental in order to mark a new beginning. It has to be something out of the ordinary and out of character. In movies, it seems that women cheat on their husbands and men buy a motorcycle. The underlying misogyny in film/TV never ceases to amaze me. In reality, it varies depending on the person and the category of change.
The three categories are physical, mental, or destination. A physical change involves doing something to your body, including buying a new wardrobe or choosing to alter your appearance. A mental change is attempting the see the world through your newfound perspective. Maybe you organize your office/room or get new furniture. A destination change is going somewhere new, if only for a little while. It's quite literally stepping out of your comfort zone.
Within the last two years, I have dyed my hair four times and gotten a tattoo. I chose to go for more physical changes because they seemed to have the least consequences. But the older we get the more limited this becomes. We can't be 30 and shave our heads or try new colors because society deems that to be unfit for the workplace. We can't be 30 and take a surprise vacation because we only have so many sick days from work. We can't be 30 and rebuild our self-image because we should already be fully defined by then. So here we are, on the precipice of having our lives together, and the deadline is way closer than we'd care to admit. We know that in "x" amount of years we won't be able to go through the dramatics of reinvention. So we panic and thus continues the cycle of crisis.
But we're so caught up in being new that we don't appreciate what we already are. We are our chaos and our mess. Every tattoo and countdown to midnight is the extra push to get us to where we already knew we were going. You can make changes for the rest of your life until you feel confident enough to say that you're okay. But I already know that you are. And if you're 30 and still figuring it out, then that's OK, too. There are no limits on individuality.
Let yourself be free to figure out your life as it unfolds, and never be afraid of a spontaneous decision every now and then. Those are what make you who you are.
