The Messy Matter of Modern Adulthood

When choosing the life you love doesn't mean loving your life

Recently, a friend told me she was proud of me “for choosing the life I love.” It was admittedly very kind, but it couldn’t have felt further from the truth. 

What she meant was that she was proud of me for, in her mind, choosing an atypical sort of adulthood, one based on what I valued, rather than what society generally expects. Specifically, I’d left my on-the-track corporate career a few years back to pursue creative writing and start my own company, I’ve opted not to have children (at least for now, which, at forty, might mean forever), and have recently been pursuing a path of theoretical freedom and flexibility. 

“I chose what I love,” I agreed, “but that definitely doesn’t mean I love my life.”

I had to laugh. 

In the last few months, I’ve felt utterly unmoored. In an attempt at an end-of-year summary, I wondered if this feeling I can’t seem to shake—that nothing matters and I’ve more or less done everything wrong—“Is being 40 or just living In 2022?” In the end, I decided it was actually just my depression flaring up and aborted the essay altogether.

This is not to say I’m upset with my choices. Building a company and pursuing writing (in my mid-thirties, as an engineer without any literary background) were the two of the most creative and challenging journeys of my career. Unfortunately, you can’t choose the outcomes, and we live in a culture where money is, overtly or otherwise, an ingrained indicator of grown-up success, not to mention the gateway to the majority of everyday comforts.

After folding my company for reasons I’ll probably get into in future posts, I’m back on LinkedIn scanning for jobs. Browsing the feed of ultra-positive self-congratulation, I see the titles of people who were once peers, far surpass roles I’m now getting interviews for. And even though I consciously went a different way than those peers—chose the life I loved—staring at their titles alone (an unfortunately easy trap when browsing LinkedIn) still makes me feel behind. It becomes easy to forget, especially in a culture organized by capitalism, what I’ve gained when those gains can’t be translated into economic progress. But in the past five years, I’ve developed parts of myself—like using writing as a tool to understand myself and the world, to channel curiosity and feeling in a way that keeps it from drying up, or knowing I can build a company and a community that imbues the feminist values I cherish, even if those values are anathema to “hockey-stick” growth— that aren’t exactly conveyed in a title, but remain invaluable to me personally.

Ann Friedman wrote a piece for Elle this year about what comes after ambition for women that hit me like a punch. “Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning of their ambitions,” she writes. “Our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work…It’s become apparent that many of the promised rewards of professional striving are never going to materialize. Why, some women are wondering, should I keep trying so hard?” I’m not sure which was more influential to me personally, that the rewards I imagined didn’t materialize, or that the higher I got, the more I realized I didn’t actually care about them.

I chose my college major by scanning a list of what would make me the most money after graduation (Electrical and Computer Engineering), so I could pay for college and be financially stable. A few years into full-time work, I wasn’t rich by any means but I had enough to make my loan payments, take my mom out to dinner, and split a group bill without having an anxiety attack. Turns out, that was enough. Money was no longer my North Star, but my values were still tied to typical professional success. It wasn’t until I had my dream job, Director at a feminist nonprofit helping women in technology, that I realized, even still, it wasn’t enough.

I’m not the only one of my friends, particularly female friends, in this position. Women who, somewhere in our mid-thirties, decided to shift gears. Interestingly, I’ve found, most of the women I know who have done so, also grew up struggling financially. The question of what we wanted to do with our lives, beyond financial stability, didn’t cross our minds until we achieved that stability. I’ve also noticed that many of us at the time of this reckoning were single and childless. So we had the freedom to not only ask ourselves that question, but to pivot freely when we did.

The past few years, for me, has been an attempt to understand what exactly feels right, rather than inheriting goals from a world that doesn’t exactly have my best interest in mind. For some, this is as simple as “duh.” For people who have always carved their own way and would rather die than follow standard tracks of adulthood. But if you don’t have the luxury to shun the system, you play in it, and then, if you’re lucky, figure things out for yourself later on.

At forty, I’m still far from figuring it out. But pursuing writing was very possibly the first thing I did not because of the rewards or self-righteousness it brought me, but because I actually loved doing it. And that was life-changing. It allowed me, very simply, to grasp the concept of want, which, of course, changed the lens with which I viewed my life.

I don’t want to tie this up in a neat bow, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how. Instead, the goal of this newsletter is a continued reflection—via personal essays, interviews, and cross-posts—on versions of adulthood that feel, not always good exactly (and often far from it), but at least true and honest—of our own making. I find myself starving for women constructing a life on their own terms, open about struggles choosing whether or not to have children, the trade-offs between financial success and pride in one’s work, the challenges of loneliness when you’re single, the compromises of partnership when you’re not. Women trying to access—outside of expectations—what it is they actually want, or at least be in honest pursuit of it.

You can choose your pick of ra-ra single women pieces, how to be a badass boss, or musings on the ideal mother. These are singular, marketable personas that are easy to paint in a way that generates envy (and money), and thus are everywhere. But the reality of carving out a life that is true to you, despite looking different from everyone else’s, is hard and messy and doesn’t always feel good. To be fair, it doesn’t always feel bad, either; when I’m not scrolling social media, it often feels pretty wonderful. And that balance—or is it just a constant see-saw?—is what this newsletter will attempt to untangle. 

You can read more about my intentions for the newsletter here. I’d love for you to share it, and, most of all, I hope you enjoy it. That it offers, if nothing else, a small slice of comfort and relatability. And I would absolutely love to hear what resonates, and if there are any particular stories or themes you’d like to hear more about!

Happy New Year! To messy paths! To figuring it out! To Unresolving!