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The Truth About Having a Midlife Crisis in Your 30s
A story of losing control, rewriting ambition, and learning how to be okay in the in-between.
I was expecting some signs.
You know, the classic “midlife crisis” markers they talk about — hitting your 40s or 50s, questioning your worth, your choices, and the point of it all after years of grinding in a stable career.
I thought it would arrive with burnout, some emotional breakdown, or at least a dramatic pause where I would ask, “What am I doing with my life?”
What I was not expecting was that this feeling of drenching in ‘identity crash’ or ‘existential dread’ would come when I was starting my life in my early 30s, newly married and happy, working in the dream job I had always wanted, and building the beautiful life I had always dreamed of.
But it came anyway. Silently. Without any warning or dramatic entries or postcards.
Somewhere between watching my once-thriving career burn to ashes and folding laundry in the silence of my home, I realized I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror anymore.
Not because of the visible scars left behind by cancer. But because of the invisible ones: the mental bruises, the identity crash, the quiet grief of…
