27 is a weird age. It’s notoriously wild and tends to throw us into a quarter life crisis with all its frustrations and wonders. I recently survived it so let’s talk a little about what’s the big deal about being 27.
Am I an adult now? I think 27 is the last age that it’s okay if you still don’t feel like an adult. You’ve been considered a grown up for quite a few years now so adulthood is not a new concept but it’s also understandable if you are still figuring things out. It’s somewhat like you know what your responsibilities are but you are not necessarily on top of everything. And because of this there may be some kind of mismatch between your headspace and lifestyle, because in my head I am an adult and I am my own independent person, but like, I’m not. I have no idea what I’m doing except that I’m figuring it out, that’s what these years are for!
What am I supposed to feel? 27 is full of conflicting emotions. You have a lot of these moments where something good happens and you think you’d be insanely happy about it, but it feels okay. Or the other way around, something awful happens and you’re okay, you know you’ll live. Is this what growing up feels like? I blame all the realizations we have about ourselves for this confusion around our own emotions. The things you thought you value the most end up not making you happy or fulfilled. But it’s likely that the steps that brought you to the life you have today, you took them when you were 18 and you’re not the same person anymore so of course it doesn’t fit well. We need to observe how we actually feel about stuff, instead of what we should be feeling. And if you’re not feeling great, and you feel stuck in your life, remember that every day you make the decision to keep on living like this. If change is what you want, then nobody else is going to do it for you, you have to do it for you.
Quarter life crisis, as they call it. You are not alone, I feel the same, we all feel the same. I mean it has a name and everything! It’s universally weird times in our lives. So how do we navigate it? Make sure you make time to listen to yourself. Because it’s not really about how you spend your day or what your daily tasks look like, when you turn 27 you tend to see things from a new perspective. And this lousy feeling hits differently because you’ve never been this old and mature before. It’s not like a teenager’s crisis because you know that this time everything is up to you. I know it’s unsettling, but it deserves attention. Because you are the only one who can pay attention to it. Your job or kids or partner will get your attention if they demand it, you need to remember to give yourself time. You are going through a legit crisis and there are two ways to go about it.
1) You can legitimize anything. Are you focused on your career and have no interest in starting a family? That’s fine, you still have time you are young! Are you switching fields? That’s alright, you realized you’re not on the best path and acted upon it. Besides you’d have much more to lose if you decided to quit in five years anyway. You don’t have a partner or a job? Well then you have perfect freedom to do whatever your heart desires, you can do work and travel across the globe and don’t worry about leaving people behind or anything. You’re soul-searching, that’s awesome!
2) Or feel bad about anything. Are you focused on your career and are nowhere near starting a family? Well you’re not getting any younger and you know that girl you met the other day started her business when she was pregnant. Oh you have a husband and 2 kids, a stable career, you own a house and are already investing for retirement? You must be jealous of the freedom, flexibility, and comparatively few responsibilities your single friends have in their lives. They surely have a more exciting life!
It’s all about the narrative. So the grass is always greener on the other side. In reality nobody knows what they’re doing, nobody has it figured out, so let others worry about themselves just focus on your narrative. You can be switching careers, getting married or divorced, having kids, starting school, quitting school, whatever it is, trust me we can come up with one heroic and one pathetic story of the exact same situation you are in. So if you’re done pitying yourself, let’s turn it around! Stories don’t end at the low point, yours won’t either. This feeling won’t last unless you keep on telling the same sad story. Think about what’s next. What happens after this dark times? What needs to change? If there is something you can do today to make your narrative more cheerful more hopeful, let’s do it.
Grow up but don’t get old. Write a good story for yourself because the society won’t be as merciful. 27 is when they say you start aging. When you are a woman at least. I know. It sucks. My friends already started getting botox and we are worried about wrinkles on our foreheads. And it’s not fair because it was like yesterday we solved our acne issues, I had two days of happy skin and now I need to do something about it again. I was shopping for an anti-aging cream earlier last year and I had two people helping me at the store and when they heard how old I was they were like, BUT YOU DON’T LOOK 27 *maşallah maşallah* and here I am thinking, is it a bad thing to look 27 now? When did that happen?
The body in decline 🙁 This is sad because it’s a direct proof that age is not just a number. Your body knows exactly what’s going on even if your soul is forever 21. I used to go out and party all night and get on with my day the next day. I can’t anymore. I can’t just leave the night in the night, my body needs to take the next day off to recover. So if you can still start drinking at the happy hour, party all night, catch up with your sleep at the beach the next day until you start the same cycle at happy hour, do it while you can, and enjoy.
But it’s also when age becomes just a number. Everyone on my Instagram feed is saying yes or getting married but there is a large group that’s nowhere near starting a family. I have friends who have kids and I have friends who still are kids. So it’s around this time that you can no longer assume that people your age share similar concerns as you. And it gets interesting because it’s also when you start to connect more with the people you used to share nothing with, like becoming friends with people fifteen years older than you, you oddly start to vibe with them. Or I have this friend who is 8 years younger than me, and we truly understand each other. This quarter life crisis thing is full of unexpected connections, which feels awesome.
Being 27 in 2021 of all years! You just don’t know if you should blame the pandemic or yourself for all this shit show. Yes, I am aware that the world is going through economic turbulence, but this is not a new thing. There has been many people who thrived during these “hard” times. Besides I grew up in Turkey where there is always something going on with the economy. You can’t wait for the economy to get better, you do what you gotta do no matter what the economy looks like.
And not only work-wise but also socially, it was a bummer. Life in 2021 was somewhat like the old normal in NYC, so we would meet up and have parties, no masks or social distancing, but then one afternoon you get that awful phone call: Hey, Tommy tested positive and I was with him before I saw you the other day so I think we should get tested… And it’s like the party you went just to be social just to see people, you didn’t even have a good time, and then this happens! I’m trying to do something good for myself here, I’m trying to turn my life around, can you please let me be for just one week!?
Turns out 27 is significant in numerology as well. I read on this blog that Saturn Return hits between 27 to 30. It means that Saturn returns to the same exact place in the sky as when you were born. And at the end of the Saturn Return, they say that “we are meant to wake up, leave our childlike behavior behind, and become a proper adult”. They also note that we enter the “Conscious Cycle,” and live life with more awareness than before, which makes us bothered by the things that we used to be cool with. And there is a cultural phenomena called Club 27 because a lot of popular artists die at age 27, like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse. So it’s not a made up thing; some weirdness happens when you’re 27.
No way these are my best years! And there is this stupid saying that our 20s are supposed to be our best years. No way. This was not even a good year let alone be the best. I am still figuring out who I am, what I wanna do in life, what I am good at and what not. I’m looking forward to being like 40, because by then I’ll know who I am. Hopfully? At least I’ll have the experience, the know-how. Now we are inventing the wheel, and there is nothing glorious about it. Maybe we look good, yeah okay. But I don’t mind wrinkles as long as I feel happy and not stuck or lost.
It seems like feeling stuck is normal when you’re 27 and if it feels like rock bottom, there is only one way to go, so hang in there. It can only get better. Hopefully. We’ll see.