Hello.
Two days ago, I turned twenty-seven.
I believe that ages often have moods — or energies, if you will — that can set the tone for a year. Eighteen, for example, had an excited sort of energy, and so did twenty-one, while nineteen and twenty had a waiting-in-the-wings feel to them. Twenty-five had a twinge of quarter-life-crisis to it, but it also felt like a good, solid age. An age I could identify with, because it sat directly in the middle of the twenties: still young, still figuring things out, but starting to get a foothold in adulthood.
Twenty-six, on the other hand, felt like an odd in-between age. No longer twenty-five, so hypothetically I should have more things figured out, but not quite in the late twenties yet. It often felt like limbo, an age that I often forgot that I was. Wasn’t I twenty-three, twenty-five… maybe even eighteen? I couldn’t be twenty-six already, could I? I was hardly qualified for such a title; not sure I wanted it.
That feeling of having a lot of things left to figure out, of still having a lot of growing up to do before I could claim any sort of late-twenties age with confidence, ended up being right. Looking back, twenty-six thankfully ended up being a year where I discovered a lot of new things, and learned how to look at some old things in new ways. It had a lot of ups and downs, and if you’d asked me at the time, I’m sure I would have preferred if those difficult times had simply been taken away and replaced with something easier.
But now, I find myself grateful for the moments where I was challenged, the moments where I hit rock bottom, because they encouraged me to move towards changes that I needed. Of course, that’s the magic of human memory — we’re very good at airbrushing the difficult moments and finding meaning in them. Yet I can’t help but find this to be a feature, not a bug.
So what happened when I was twenty-six, and why do I feel so much better about turning twenty-seven? Let’s take a closer look.
Twenty-six was the year that I immigrated to Canada as a Permanent Resident. It was also the year that the pandemic finally started easing in some critical ways: I was twenty-six the first time I went back to a restaurant after the pandemic, twenty-six the first time I started hanging out with groups of people again, twenty-six the first time I met my co-workers in person. But while this slow return to normal life was a good thing, it also brought with it a level of internal pressure that I didn’t know how to navigate.
When we were all staying at home, when everything was scary and uncertain, I intentionally treated myself gently. I didn’t need to worry too much about the clothes I was wearing, because who was going to see them, anyway? I didn’t need to wash my face every night or shower too much, because Zoom hid the occasional breakout or bad hair day. I didn’t need to write, because a pandemic seemed like a distinctly bad time to pressure myself to create art. I didn’t need to clean the apartment too often, because it wasn’t like we were going to have guests over. In essence, I lowered the bar for pretty much everything, because the main thing I wanted to be was okay. We were living in a world where I was afraid for myself, for my partner, for my family, for my friends. I was afraid to open windows, afraid to grocery shop, denied a lot of the things that I’d done to make myself happy in the previous, pre-covid world.
So by now you probably know that I wasn’t one of those people who mastered how to make sourdough bread or wrote a book during the pandemic. But my strategy worked for me. When the restrictions started loosening and fear stopped gripping people so tightly, I was still a functioning, relatively happy human being. I’d gotten through it pretty much intact, and that was the beginning and end of my expectations for myself.
The problem was, those were my pandemic expectations. My expectations for myself back in the real world were far higher, and far more unforgiving. Almost overnight, I expected myself to improve my wardrobe, my skincare, my exercise routine, my diet, my writing, my Japanese studying, my social life… all at once. After all, what was I waiting for?! The pandemic was basically over, wasn’t it?! Everyone else was a fully functioning, better version of themselves, so why wasn’t I?!?!?!
Oh. Oh poor twenty-six-year-old Mara. She had a lot to learn.
Somehow, I’d gotten it into my head that everyone could cook themselves healthy meals, exercise all the time, have a great social life, pursue their hobbies, meditate every day, hold a 9-5 job, have a spotless home, and look great while doing it. I blame the internet, and also some part of myself that believed everything in my life would improve once the pandemic got better.
Needless to say, going very quickly from “just try your best to exist, sweetie, everyone’s having a hard time right now,” to “TODAY is the time for a glow-up — and by the way, you’re already behind; why can’t you hold it together like everyone else?” wasn’t a particularly enjoyable or sustainable shift.
What ultimately broke the camel’s back was a planner.
The Self Planner is a quarterly personal planning journal that uses scientifically-backed methods to, in their words, “create something that lends itself to making success inevitable — through planning, execution, and measurement.” It has a bucket list, a space to create quarterly goals, weekly and daily pages with spots for gratitude, goals, targets, a habit tracker, and scheduling down to the half-hour. At the end of each day, you’re supposed to give yourself a “plan to reality” score, where you rate how closely you stuck to your schedule.
For some people — and heck, even for me, at a different time in my life — this could be a great tool. But ever since a period of intense burnout in university, I’ve had a complicated relationship with this kind of highly structured productivity tracking. I have a hard time seeing schedules and written goals as flexible or adaptable to the realities of my life, so I’ll run myself ragged trying to live up to the standards I set rather than disappoint the planner. Basically, anything more complicated than a basic to-do list can become toxic in my hands.
Ultimately, I only used the planner for a few weeks before I called my mom, crying, feeling completely overwhelmed and confused about how everyone else could handle life so well and I couldn’t.
To nobody’s shock, she told me to stop using the planner. And during that conversation, I told my mom something that I would keep repeating to myself for months: there must be a better way. A better way to live my life, a better way to go about this, a better way to get where I wanted to go. I finally understood that the tools I’d used to achieve things pre-pandemic (namely, having high expectations and very little self-compassion or understanding for when I failed to meet them), and the tools I’d used to get through the pandemic (having very few expectations at all), were no longer the tools I wanted to use going forward.
I didn’t know what those new tools were going to look like, or where to find them. But I decided to take it on faith that they existed out there somewhere, because the alternative was to keep struggling with the ones I had. So I started looking.
Thankfully, far greater minds than mine have spent a lot of time trying to answer the question of how people can live happy, fulfilling lives, and I wanted to hear everything they’d discovered. My first stop was The Happiness Lab, a podcast hosted by Dr. Laurie Santos, the professor who first taught the now-famous Happiness Class (technically called Psychology and the Good Life) at Yale. Dr. Santos dedicates the podcast to uncovering and discussing the latest research about what makes people happy, and I highly recommend it.
Whenever Dr. Santos interviewed an author who I wanted to know more about, or mentioned principles that seemed interesting, I followed up. I made a list of books that sounded promising, and started reading. Questions on my mind were: can people actually change (yes), if so how (habits help), am I actually… really bad at self-compassion (yes, but you can get better), are there ways to be both productive and happy (yes, systems are crucial), and a handful of others. Thankfully, there’s research on just about everything these days, and I’ve always been a nerd, so I was happy to dig into it.
The other thing I did was sign up for a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.
Editor’s note: funny enough, this post actually ends here. I found it in my blog post drafts, and it stood out because it appears to be the only piece of public-facing writing that I did over a span of roughly two years.
If you’d asked me back then if I was unhappy, I probably would’ve said no. I would’ve called the Planner Fiasco a one-off disaster, waved my hand in the general direction of covid, and shrugged it all off as something to laugh self-deprecatingly about later. But my memories from that time have a different quality to them, looking back. Like there were shadows lurking in every corner.
I was aware of the fact that I was privileged: living in Canada, with a good job, in a stable relationship, saving money so that I could go travel the world. I think this awareness, to some extent, prevented me from admitting to myself what was going on. And there were always bright spots to focus on: pretty clouds to look at, new recipes to try, another book to read, another DnD get-together to host.
But at the time that I wrote this blog post, I was aware of the fact that something was wrong, and if it was within my power, then I was determined to fix it. Part of this, I think, was simply the joy of having a prefrontal cortex that’d finally come online, so I was able to look at certain recurring thought patterns and stories I’d told myself in the past and ask: does this serve me? A lot of the time, the answer was no.
I did a lot of important internal work in those years, and the post-covid transition that I wrote about here did (eventually) end up going smoothly. For what it’s worth, I highly recommend Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to anyone who’s interested. I did mine online through UCSD, and there are things I learned in the course that still inform how I approach life now.
Yet reading through my diary entries from the time, I find myself wishing I could go back and tell that girl: yeah, it’s great that you’re improving your self-compassion. Figuring out how to meal-prep. Experimenting with drastically cutting back your screen time. Meditating. But baby… you’re unhappy because you’re in a life that fundamentally doesn’t fit who you are, and your reaction to that isn’t a character flaw.
It’s the canary in the coal mine.
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