Saturday, January 19, 2013

Sailors


I've been away celebrating a friend's 30th birthday at the beach this weekend and was intrigued by a story that the birthday girl's work colleague had urged her to read in today's paper.

It was in The Advertiser (might I add, I found it on the Herald Sun website from October 2012 - come on Adelaide, catch up!) and was called . . . 

"Turning 30 . . . and so over it"

This is for the girls out there who are in the same boat . . . 


What happens when you turn 30 and realise you're not living the life you'd expected?





WHEN Kasey Edwards was 32, she woke one morning and realised she didn't want to go to work.

"And not just on that day, it was like I didn't want to go ever again," she remembers.

For Edwards, a highflying management consultant, who had worked her "butt off" climbing the corporate ladder, the realisation she hated her job - despite the six-figure salary that went with it - was devastating.

"It was shocking because I had done everything I was supposed to do to make me happy and one day I realised that I wasn't," Edwards says.

"And I felt an incredible guilt about it. It was like, 'What is wrong with me?' How dare I be unhappy when I have everything I thought I always wanted.'

Edwards was suffering from what some psychologists have dubbed the quarter-life crisis. That's right. Forget the mid-life crisis that traditionally happens about the age of 45.

These days Gen Y are having a crisis a good 15 years earlier, as they grapple with the feeling that their lives haven't turned out quite as they envisaged. Or that the life they thought they wanted isn't so appealing after all.

For women, in particular, there's also an expectation that by 30 they should have nixed the career/marriage/kids trifecta. And if they haven't, some start to get anxious because things haven't gone to plan.

Melbourne counsellor and psychotherapist Paul Cullen first noticed the phenomenon when he realised that about 70 per cent of his clients were aged from 28 to 32 and "a remarkable number were weeks either side of their 30th birthday".

*********

Shock horror, my 30th birthday is in a couple of months. This Cullen dude could be on to something.

It certainly explains why I've been waking up in the laundry at night for no apparent reason . . .



4 comments:

debbie said...

You will love your thirtys more than your twenties. You know your self, you know what you want in a partner. I love my thirties much more than my twenties..all that will come if you want it because the saying is true it all happens as its meant to happen..xD

Brown Button Trading said...

Couldn't have said it better Debbie - Kate my dear, yes its daunting and christ - i'm 34 this year.... but i'm starting to get really comfortable with this 30's business. Enjoying what I have got, not focusing on what I haven't xxxx

Kate said...

Hmm, I'm yet to be convinced but thanks for the pep talk girls! x

Gild and Grace said...

Very interesting article Kate. I fled the jurisdiction when I turned 30! Didn't feel ready for it at all but in the 3 years since I've really found it great. I think your 30's are when you really come into your own :)

Abbey x