A Leap of Faith
The Quarter-Life Crisis I Didn’t Know I Was Having
Eight months ago, I crammed into a minivan with two friends for a weekend getaway to an island off the coast of Maine. As we got on Route 1 North I watched the Boston skyline shrink in the rearview mirror.
As a kid from maine who attended college in Boston I’d made that drive plenty of times. But this time, I knew in my heart the departure meant something different, even if my body and brain hadn’t quite caught up to what that something was. A risk? A beginning? A pivot? I wasn’t sure.
In a way, that’s the part of the story I’m still in.
I started this blog because I was looking for a resource that felt honest about what it actually looks like to be in your mid-twenties right now, navigating a world that hands you a diploma and then immediately asks you to have a plan. I was scrolling LinkedIn and seeing jobs with titles I barely understood. I wanted to ask everyone I saw, “what the fck do I do now” but I didn’t want to seem like the only one who didn’t have their sh*t together yet. I needed insight from real people and I couldn’t find what I wanted online. I wanted a platform to hear from real people about their real jobs, what they hated/loved about it, and how they got there. My quarter life crisis became The Quarter Life Compass, a platform built for people navigating their 20s and early adulthood. Not as someone who has it all figured out, because I still don’t, but as a collection of experiences in the form of a public journal for people who are also in this same murky middle era of life.
Two weeks before that drive, I had quit my job. The job I’d slid into right out of college after months of rejection letters. The one I was actually really good at. The job where I learned a lot about being a professional, wore a lot of hats, took “ownership” and had “agency”, and worked alongside interesting people. The salary was nonprofit-world low, but the work felt meaningful and my life felt tidy at the beginning. So why leave?
I’ve turned that question over more times than I can count. I was dead broke, working wicked hard, and piecing together a life for myself. At the same time, my life had slowly began to decay, and the intense routine I had valued initially started wearing down my spirit. Still, so many young people in Boston participate in that kind of grind to get ahead. So was it impulsivity? A subconscious wish to jump off the “grownup train”? Some stubborn, intuitive sense that I was not quite on the right path? Probably a little of all three, with a sprinkle of “I really need to make more money”.
The thing is, underneath all of that motion, something else was quietly falling apart: my physical and mental health. I was still on my mom’s health insurance, with doctors back in Maine I hadn’t seen in years. I was working two jobs six days a week and couldn’t afford quality food, let alone therapy or healthcare. The routines that had kept me functional were eroding, and I was too busy scrambling to notice how much.
After our weekend of sailing, ice cream, and sunbathing the girls returned to the big city and I remained in my small childhood bedroom, most recently used as storage of various athletic equipment and serving dishes in my mom’s house. I was still paying rent for my apartment in Boston but decided to work odd jobs for the summer and stay at home while I figured out my next steps.
What followed was, to put it charitably, a season of exploration. During the summer of 2025 I: got a job managing rental properties, babysat, cleaned houses, considered getting my real estate license, directed a theater camp, found a lease take-over for my Boston apartment, and applied for 12 jobs.
By September I had moved out of the city, moved in with my boyfriend, found a part-time remote job in historic preservation, started working remotely part-time for the property management company, got into baking sourdough, started going to the Universalist Unitarian church in my new neighborhood, began weekly acupuncture, resumed therapy, enrolled in a graduate program in project management, applied to six jobs, quit the graduate program in project management, and applied to an accelerated teacher certification program.
I am nothing if not thorough in my chaos.
The journey is the destination. I’m choosing to believe that, even on the days it feels like an insurmountable pile of bullsh*t.
More soon.
