I’m hosting a retreat on San Juan Island over the Summer Solstice! June 19-23. If you’re between the ages of 21-39 and could use some time to sort out life with some fabulous people, this is the place for you. There are two spots left! Come join us!
I was delighted to talk with
about dreams and dreamwork in a recent edition of Morning Person.I joined the wonderful Therapy Works podcast in the UK to talk about Quarterlife.
I’d love to get to know you! Please introduce yourself to the community on our first thread. This is an open invitation for all subscribers.
Our next gathering for paid subscribers will be on Sunday, July 7th at 10am PT—we’re skipping June and moving things to the beginning of the month in anticipation of the holiday season end of year.
It’s been almost a year since my last Q&A with a reader in a series I called “Something Better Than This” named after the following quote from social psychologist Kenneth Keniston (and subsequently the first chapter of Quarterlife):
“That a person cannot fully articulate their aspirations does not mean that they may not still rebel against the discrepancy between what is and what they dimly, almost unconsciously, sense might be. People may feel that they have a right to ‘something better than this,’ without being able to define the ‘something.’"
I’ve always appreciated this permission to be in the liminal space, knowing that something is wrong but not yet knowing how to make it right. This in-between space of uncertainty is where so much of our greatest creativity and growth takes root.
Today, I wanted to share two follow-up notes from readers whose questions I answered a while back. I really loved hearing what had unfolded for them since I wrote. You can read their original questions, my responses, and their notes below, each of which arrived many months later.
If you have a question about Quarterlife, finding stability or meaning, dreamwork, the journey of individuation, or a concept in Jungian psychology, please send me a note. Just reply to this email with a question, or email me at satyadoylebyock[@]substack. com.
(This is a long one—you may want to click through to the web or the app if you’re on email.)
R asks: I'm 35 and navigating a really tumultuous moment through, ironically, also one of the happiest periods of my life.
After years of painful hookups and bad swipes, I met my life partner. With tremendous support from a therapist, I've separated from a very codependent dynamic from my high caste South Asian family. I found a spiritual path and community in my hometown that has been a powerful anchor for finding myself and a sense of equanimity in my life. Still, the tumult comes from uncertainty: My partner and I live long distance, and because of a myriad of factors including the economy, being together in the same city is tough right now.
The initial celebration I courted when I got engaged this year now feels clouded by doubt: Onlookers wondering aloud what kind of life I might be leading if I'm in a long distance marriage; family openly praying my relationship breaks. I'm left wondering about what happens next: do children make sense for us? Does the city I live in make sense when it's so clearly unaffordable for me?
It feels like the moment I started to forge a path for my own life, so many hungry ghosts of doubt and challenging circumstances arose to greet me. With my family more and more confused about who I am and the decisions I'm making for myself, I feel unmoored. I wake up from panicked visions of giving birth alone, of family members dying feeling disappointment towards me. In my waking hours, I search for the next big project or accomplishment to commit to. I do feel happiness, but it's not been a period of happiness that provides certainty. I also have dreams of following spiritual paths, of laughter and love, of terrifying unknowns.
Dear R:
The foundation of what you seem to be struggling with is that you’re a Stability Type who is starting, as you say, to “forge a path” towards meaning for your own, individual life. This is a beautiful thing. You fell in love! Congratulations!
Of course, the problem is that it comes at a cost. Becoming oneself in the midst of enmeshed relationships very often means that other people will view the emergence of your deepest self as a threat. You are disrupting what they had imagined for a shared future together. But codependence will always be disrupted by personal growth. It is necessary and okay.
I am very sad to hear that your family is “openly praying” for the end of your relationship. No matter what they think about your partner, it’s unacceptable behavior. You are an adult. There is no excuse for your family to announce their hope that you lose someone or something you love. Nor is there any excuse for threats that you’ll lose them if you follow your dreams.
This kind of family dynamic may succeed in keeping an adult child close for a while, but it ultimately breeds resentment and pain in the long term. While there are always cultural differences around parents’ expectations for their adult children, mutual respect is a requirement of any relationship. Coercion and disapproval don’t work in conservative Christian households that force gay children to suppress who they are, and they don’t work in high-caste South Asian households that try to suppress unsanctioned love marriages. You shouldn’t have to cut off a part of yourself to be accepted.
Facing this is part of the growth you’re stepping into now. In fact, I don’t think the issues with your family or your growing doubt are a side-effect of your falling in love so much as core to your development right now.
A mainstay of adult development is to fight for your own independent life against a lack of understanding from your parent(s) and community. This is part of individual evolution. In big or small ways, we all have to do this—though, some people certainly have a harder time of it than others.
You say that your family is confused about what you’re up to and that, in turn, you are feeling unmoored. I can’t help but wonder if the problem here is really that you took a step towards your independent life and then have since taken two steps back.
You’re surrounded by your family, who are very clear in their perception about who you are and are not. They are mirroring a specific reality back to you en force. Meanwhile, the person you call your life partner is somewhere far away. You see them less and have far less history with them. Given this arrangement, gnawing doubt seems inevitable.
Rather than live in doubt, what would it mean to double down on your initial instinct instead? Can you take another risk and trust what’s calling you forward?
There are further questions you’ve raised about economic difficulties. I didn’t get a full picture of the scope from what you’re describing, but you have said that your hometown, where you’re living, is unaffordable. So, I can’t help but wonder if there is a solution that involves moving away. I’m sure you’ve considered this many times, but I feel like it’s worth a nudge—if there’s any way to make it work, it’s probably worth it. The added separation from your family is likely to give you some space to think for yourself.
Ultimately, you need to prove yourself to yourself at this moment. The more that your family’s perception of you undermines your trust in your decision-making, the more you’re likely to give up on your dreams. Once that initial momentum dies away, it’s harder to get it back. You’ll doubt yourself in a deeper way later and wonder if you were just being silly or naive the first time around.
I have no idea what challenges lie ahead for you, and I’m not suggesting any of this is easy. But when we’re truly on our own paths, even mistakes and struggles feel more fulfilling than living with the vague knowledge that we’re evading our true lives. There’s something very significant about the clarity you express about the life you want. And one thing seems clear: The status quo of the past has needed to be severed and transformed. Trust in the future you see for yourself and your determination to live your life on your own terms. For now, happiness may not deliver the same kind of certainty that it has in the past. But, as you courageously set off in pursuit of love and your individual meaning, that uncertainty might actually be the point.
xo, Satya
Satya,
I wanted to let you know that I took the leap and my partner and I finally managed to find a way to live together (and out of my hometown)!
In the lead-up to my move, my parents were really insistent that we meet so that they could talk to both of us and share some ground rules. I had this gnawing feeling in my stomach, and after talking to several friends and my therapist (and rereading your response a few times), I realized it was time for me to take that step forward I had in the past and pause contact with my family. It's been eye-opening. Living in my new home and taking in my new surroundings, I have so much clarity. I honestly sometimes can't believe the life I'm living is possible.
We’re looking for an auspicious time and date for our marriage now I’ll be eloping with my partner hopefully next month. One of my friends will be there as a witness, wherever it ends up happening. It's not the marriage I ever envisioned for us, and maybe that's the point. :)
I don't know what kind of relationship I'll have with my family (if at all), but whole parts of myself feel like they have room to take up space now. I just know that I am honoring my life as it unfolds. There has been a lot of pain and isolation, but turning to friends and my spiritual community has been very helpful.
Thank you for your note. It continues to resonate with me and, on days when I feel like I forget my why, I turn to many supports including your words.
With deep appreciation, R
H asks: I just turned 31, and 30 was probably the hardest year of my life. Your book really helped me reflect on my twenties. I realized that I'm definitely more of a Meaning type, but thought I should be a Stability type all through my young adulthood, hence the constant feeling of being unable to 'fit' into my own life. I moved from full-time office job to full-time office job to a mental health breakdown, to a part-time office job, babysitting, grad school, back to full-time office job, then a psychiatric hospital, and somehow jumped right back into my full-time office job. I felt like a failure every time I left a job. Each time, making moves felt like the hardest decision in my life, with huge stakes, but I kept leaving because it felt. . . just wrong, deep in my body. But with a history of depression and anxiety in my family, it was just all chalked up to that. I've been on every type of medication, starting at age 14, but nobody encouraged me to go to consistent therapy until I went on my own at age 25.
Even though I've recently found myself in a well-paying, remote position in an area of interest, I spend a lot of days crying, overwhelmed with the feeling that it's just still not quite right. It feels like a personal failing to not be able to find the right thing for me again and again and again. I know that I'm also entirely overwhelmed by the state of the world. I'm trying now to focus on finding joy and fulfillment outside of work, realizing that I barely have hobbies, and certainly don't have passions beyond 'make the world a better place.' But I don't even know where to start in finding my own passion and joy.
Dear H:
Oh gosh, I’m so familiar with wanting to be a person who can just work a job “like everyone else” and not be miserable doing it. As anyone who was friends with me in my early twenties can attest, I was always burning out from jobs and having big or little emotional breakdowns. I tell one of these stories in my book, but there were plenty of others. I’d feel like I was trying my absolute best to be “good” or “normal” in some way but I would reach a point of misery that just couldn’t be reconciled and I’d suddenly quit or give notice. I also barely understood the word “hobby” and was (I mean, still am) endlessly overwhelmed by the state of the world. Let’s just say: I relate. In my case, working for myself has been a game-changer. As an astrologer once told me in a birth chart reading: “You’re a terrible employee.” She’s not wrong. No matter how hard I’d try to be a great employee, I am just much more suited to work for myself. So, this is a bit simplistic (and I have a lot more to say below), but I did wonder upon reading your letter if the same might be true for you. Would you be happier pouring your creative energies and compassion into your own work? Would this be possible?
I also wondered if you might feel some resonance with The New Yorker profile by Rachel Aviv called “The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs,” about a Quarterlifer who was diagnosed and medicated constantly throughout her 20s. It’s a painful read, so brace yourself if you choose to go there. It really demands a reckoning with how we fail to attend to developmental psychology in America when modern psychiatry is built on diagnosis and medication versus developmental struggles, let alone incurred trauma, systemic stressors, family systems issues, gender confusion, and more.
This is all to say, I’ve thought a great deal about how best to respond to your inquiry. Ultimately, over and above the questions of work or meaning and stability in the abstract sense, I found myself wanting to address the question of your fundamental well-being.
I have a hunch that there are some underlying issues that may have been overlooked in favor of psychiatric diagnoses and medications. I’m going to focus my attention on one broad area in particular: your blood sugar, nutrition, and hormonal health.
Why am I going here, and so quickly?
It’s a combination of things: the age of onset of difficulties, the length of time you’ve battled with these feelings of instability despite many attempts to change things, your mention of family history, the degree to which you have struggled, and the specific form of anguish that I felt while reading your email (edited down). My hope is that there may actually be a quite specific solution to what you’re feeling and that it’s not being addressed.
So let’s jump back to when this all seems to have started for you, around the age of 14. Did anyone explore your hormonal health back in the day? Were you placed on birth control? Has anyone talked with you about this since?
For a variety of reasons, puberty is frequently a turning point for young women, and a negative one. It doesn’t all have to do with hormonal health—there are so many social forces that objectify and traumatize girls, teach them that they’re objects, and silence their voices—but what you wrote just made me wonder if you may have chronic blood sugar and/or hormone imbalances that began with puberty and continue in some form to this day.
If you were my client, I’d want to work with you to find one or several very competent, feminist endocrinologists, nurse practitioners, Chinese medicine specialists, or naturopathic doctors with whom to explore your hormonal health we well as your relationship to food. I think talking with several different practitioners is important because this is an area that, despite being massively important, is poorly understood and often misdiagnosed.
If you were my client, these are things I’d want you to explore:
Have your B-vitamin and iron levels checked and, if they’re in any way suspect, consider taking daily supplements ASAP, and follow the recommendations of your healthcare professional. Being low on either of these can lead to a host of issues including unrelenting existential despair.
Begin eating a protein-rich breakfast in the morning, with cooked veggies if possible, and always before coffee (if you drink coffee). There’s competing research on this, but I’ve learned to do this from female practitioners whom I trust deeply and I swear it has changed my life and changed the lives of many women I know. Your blood sugar is much more likely to remain balanced throughout the day if you do not drink coffee before food and if you are loading in protein first thing in the day.
If you’re vegetarian or vegan, the above two points are hugely important.
I’d be curious how caffeine, sugar, alcohol, and other substances may be affecting you. Wheat too. Different people have different levels of tolerance to everything, including some allergies that manifest more as mood disorders than anything else.
Is there any family history or possibility that you have PCOS, endometriosis, or any problems with your thyroid?
Are you getting enough sleep? Are you sleeping deeply? Has there ever been a concern about sleep apnea?
Are you on birth control? Do you have any concerns about how birth control has affected your moods?
I encourage you to explore these questions and more with qualified medical professionals from various backgrounds. Chronic mental and emotional health issues are too often treated as symptoms to be eradicated rather than as problems to be solved. We need to get to the root of what has been happening for you all these years!
I so deeply want you to feel better. I want you to know that you can be alive in this world—this world—and feel at peace more often than not.
Finally, because I can’t help myself, I want to say one final thing: I do hope you’ll also explore at least one non-rational, impractical, entirely unnecessary, “what’s-the-point?” activity. Just because. Just because they exist and something calls you. Ask your soul what she wishes she were doing and then spend time doing that.
Maybe it’s dance or swimming. Walking in the forest. Painting. Drawing. Ceramics. Interior design. Sewing. Gardening. Flower arranging. Baking. Pasta making. Piano playing. Novel reading. Novel writing. Poetry. Sexual expression and play.
Rather than try to find a “hobby,” which just strikes me as just another painful problem to solve, see if you can make the goal of finding and making beauty. That’s it. Just lean into beauty. Explore your sensual self in the coming months. Make it a goal or a task if you have to. Just make pointless beauty a non-negotiable priority.
xo,
Satya
(Response submitted via comments)
Hi there!
I know this post is old but I wanted to follow up; I am the person who submitted this question. Since submitting and seeing Satya's answer, a lot has changed in my life! I did get my hormone levels checked and all appeared normal. Changes include being diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis) and starting treatment for that, starting to take iron and a daily vitamin; switching from coffee to green tea, and eating breakfast before or with my tea (breakfast with ideally a bit of veggies and/or a good amount of protein), eating less red meat, moving to a new city (!!!!), taking a pottery class and being awful at it but still having fun, exercising with weights, walking in the woods a lot and trying to get at least a little fresh air in morning and at night, etc.
I'm not a brand new person by any means, and a lot of things haven't changed that much, but I'm also no longer crying a majority of the days, I'm feeling that awful pit in my stomach a lot less frequently, and generally feeling less bad overall. I'm also better at sitting with some uncomfortable feelings without spiraling. Life-changing stuff even if it didn't like...change my whole life and get rid of my anxiety, etc.
I wanted to share this here instead of just emailing Satya in case this is helpful for anyone else. It's cliche, but a lot of the basics that everyone is always on about (breakfast, walking) really made a huge difference for me : )
Do you have a question for me? Just respond to this email or send me a note at satyadoylebyock[@]substack.com
Hi Satya,
I really enjoy being subscribed to your newsletters. Thank you so much for all the thoughtful care you put into them. I have a personal question as a quarter-lifer: trying to navigate health and career.
I'm in my late twenties and much of my life feels like it's going alright. I'm in a relationship that, albeit codependent at times, feels very supportive and communicative. My relationship with my family is decent, and now that I live near my hometown again for the first time in 10 years, I'm enjoying their company a few times per week. I have many hobbies and play outside a lot. Through lots of therapy I've committed to regularly seeking " play" through recreation and time with friends.
My career feels nebulous and uncertain. Throughout my childhood schooling, I had this strange sense that I was " meant to do something big" here on earth- some grandiose career of service towards helping the environment. I never had a clear idea of what/how that would look like, but it's a bit of a haunted feeling that I'm not fully using my privilege and gifts to my fullest potential.
My early twenties were spent in a total health crisis while also trying to be fully independent as an adult. So much of my time and especially money was put towards out-of-pocket health care with various nutritionists, naturopaths, acupuncturists, etc, which took almost all my meager financial resources. Simultaneously, my "career" was really any job I could physically manage without going into huge inflammatory flares. Ideallic farm-work in the Rocky Mountains slowly transformed into depressing admin jobs at small nonprofits; all I could handle when my health was in its worst. I'm still at the same work-from-home nonprofit job, one that I took because I couldn't stand much else at the time.
Now I'm at a crossroads. I feel strong enough to try something new, but not quite healthy enough to take on something as stressful as grad school. My current job is in the solar industry at a nonprofit, and I try to remember that my role is one piece of the puzzle towards a world powered by renewables, but is this all there is? Is this all I came here to do? I have this gnawing feeling that there's big work to be doing, but I am having a hard time understanding what that is or where to start.
I'm trying to understand how my values and creativity can become cohesive with a real-world job. Specifically, how do I uncover this big sense I have that I came here to do more? (not more as in more stress, more hustle, but just something very meaningful and impactful).
Thanks so much for reading. I deeply appreciate you!
Amanda
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Which book of C.G Jung is best for a beginner student ? , any podcast, any lecture series on his books and works with simply explained please suggest