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It’s been just over two years since Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood launched into the world and one year since its blessed follow-up publication in the UK. I wanted to mark this anniversary (a bit belatedly—there’s so much going on in the world) by sharing an excerpt of the book for new readers and a few media highlights from the last couple of years.
I haven’t written that much about Quarterlife, Stability Types & Meaning Types, or the Four Pillers of Growth here because, well, amidst the wonderful marketing of the book that I’ve had the fortune of doing, I discovered that I needed this space for my own creative exploration and curiosity. This hasn’t been entirely conscious. I’ve felt, in fact, that I was failing readers by not giving them (maybe you!) more of the kind of thing you may have signed up for this newsletter to receive. But the truth is that after so many years of thinking about a book, working on a book, editing a book, and then marketing a book, the creative well on the topic can run a bit dry. You can begin to feel like a brand trying to brand more than a writer trying to write.
Or I can. I did.
But what’s also true is that I love my book, I’m so proud of it and happy that it’s made its way into the world, and so genuinely honored to hear that it’s supporting people in their lives. I’d hoped to add a drop of orientation to a profoundly disorienting process of becoming a human in this world. We’ve lost so many of the structures that used to clarify where we are headed in life, and why. But no one can live for long without some sense of what they’re doing here. There’s too much cultural chaos for our souls to not, at some point, begin tugging at our individual shirt sleeves asking hey, what are we doing? What is the point of all this? Is this what I want to be doing? It might arise as anxiety or depression. It might be masked with an addiction or a hard demeanor. But in a world with so much pain, militarism, and consumerism, it’s just a matter of time before deeper questions about our lives begin to dawn. More often than not, those questions aren’t waiting for midlife to arise. That’s a good thing.
I hope my book will help orient readers back towards themselves, encourage them to trust the pathless path, and know they’re not alone.
I’ve had the honor of talking with so many wonderful people about Quarterlife for various podcasts, radio shows, TV shows, and for print. A relatively comprehensive list can be found here, but a small selection of my very favorite conversations that I think beautifully capture the book’s messages are:
NPR’s Morning Edition
NPR’s LifeKit with Marielle Segarra
The Guardian profile by Elle Hunt
Apple News in Conversation with Shumita Basu
The Joseph Campbell Podcast with John Bucher
There was also this ever-so-delightful shout-out from Camila Cabello on her Instagram last summer when she posted an image of Quarterlife while on a beach in a string bikini to her 65 million followers. (Which subsequently kicked off a frenzied “hot girl summer” series of articles in People, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and beyond.) I couldn’t have asked for a better Quarterlife representative.
And now, an excerpt! This is from Chapter 5 on Stability Types, and it’s the first time that readers meet Mira, a former patient of mine.
Each subsequent chapter follows her journey and those of three other Quarterlifers—two Stability Types and two Meaning Types in all.
Mira
“I feel like I’m one of those stories you hear about,” Mira began to tell me in our first session. “Like a person who gets in a bad car accident and survives, and then suddenly has revelations about how they should have been living their life differently.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I think I need to adjust some things about my life before something really bad happens.” Mira bit her cheek and looked out the window for a moment before looking back at me. “I need to figure things out. But it’s all really confusing to me, honestly.”
Mira was thirty-one years old and a lawyer at a reputable firm. Her clothes were often composed of grays and blacks. She wore sweater dresses and tights, sometimes dark jeans and nice boots. She dressed carefully, but simply, as if she were always trying to disappear easily into a crowd. Mira was respectful and quiet in demeanor, but sitting with her, I got a deep sense that she was stifled. My own breathing often felt constricted as I tried to stay present with her tightly controlled body.
“I have this feeling,” she told me after a few sessions, as she got more comfortable with me. “I have this feeling that I’m about to go crazy.” She blushed as the words came out and laughed. “Oh my god. That sounds so crazy!”
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” I replied. “Tell me more.”
“I just know I’m sort of lying,” she told me. “It’s really hard to explain.”
Mira was recently married and she was happy with her husband. The previous fall, they’d had a tiny ceremony at city hall before traveling to India for a much larger, days-long Hindu wedding. She expressed loving both events, laughing as she described her husband, Tom, not being able to understand a word of what was happening during the many hours of their Indian wedding. Then Mira returned to the topic that had led us into those happy scenes. She teared up and dabbed her eyes with a tissue: she felt her husband didn’t fully know her.
“I know he loves me, and he’s good to me, but I keep a lot from him,” she continued. “I’m not keeping secrets. I’m not doing anything bad that he doesn’t know about,” she was quick to follow up. “But I know that I keep a huge part of myself hidden from him. From everyone.”
Mira felt out of step with herself, as if she wasn’t quite living her own life. But she hadn’t come to therapy because she wanted to talk about this. She started therapy because she knew, instinctively, that she had to stop hiding from herself, and others.
“I don’t know what I’d even say to Tom.” Mira paused, looking frustrated and defeated at the very idea of the conversation. “I’m not sure he’d totally get it even if I put the feelings in perfect terms. It’s so . . .” She trailed off. “It’s just so abstract.”
Stability Types often feel like they’re hiding, but our language doesn’t quite contain the words or concepts needed to convey that experience. Stability Types, like Mira, tend to present well— as long as a true emotional crisis has not yet hit. Their lives are often quite functional, if not enviable. They have checked all the boxes and many have enjoyed doing so. Mira liked a lot of the things about her work, and she liked her colleagues. She was well paid, and her life with her husband was loving and secure. But like many Stability Types, Mira felt that something was missing. She was fine, good even, but there was also something that was terribly “off.”
These ethereal feelings are often more easily captured through metaphor. I asked Mira to try to find one to help describe her inner life and she told me she often felt as if she were engaging with others through windows, or as if the world were an aquarium and she was a visitor.
“It’s like this sense that I’m in the world, but no one else knows it. Like I’m watching everyone with my nose pressed to the glass.”
These descriptions gave us a portal to explore together what she was experiencing, with increasing specificity and insight.
“You feel like people don’t see you?” I asked.
“I mean.” She paused, contemplatively. “I know people see me, obviously.” She rolled her eyes a bit at herself. “But I don’t think people see me. I don’t think they have any idea that I’m often not really there.”
I asked her to draw this feeling and, after some reluctance, she easily sketched a picture of a figure standing behind a tall wall, with several other figures on the other side. Then she elaborated: The wall is made of ice, and she’s frozen on one side. She’s there, but she’s not quite involved in the world of which she’s a part; she can see it all with her eyes but can’t feel any of it.
“Have you always felt like this?”
Mira nodded. “I think so.” Then she paused and looked up, searching her memory. “Well, actually, there have been a few times when I didn’t feel that way.”
“Will you tell me about those times? What was it like?”
“It was like laughing,” she responded almost immediately, her eyes twinkling. “Or dancing without wondering who might be looking and what they might be thinking.” We both laughed a little at the sudden emergence of joy from her. Her posture had visibly softened.
“Can you tell me more while you’re feeling that? I want to know more about what life was like when you felt free. What were you doing?”
“I was traveling in India after college. There were a few months when I was visiting family. I started traveling in Southern India with some cousins and friends but then . . .” She paused again, her eyes now conveying vibrancy instead of reluctance. “I stayed. I’d found a hostel that I wanted to stay at longer and I ended up surfing for weeks on the coast of Goa.” Mira let out a big sigh. She shook her head as if in awe of the memories. “I’d literally wake up and surf in the mornings. I’d grab tea from the front desk and just go to the beach with whoever else was at the hostel that week. When I was done, I’d read all day. It was really amazing.”
Seeing Mira light up helped me to understand who she was underneath her tightly controlled demeanor. She had clearly loved that time of her life so much, and watching her remember what it was like ushered in waves of relief. Those memories provided tremendous insight into the ethereal something, the sense of inner alignment for which she was searching.
Generally, Stability Types are more attuned to the external world than the internal. They’re typically oriented to what they view as rational thinking, rather than the “irrational,” mystical, or imaginal, and they perceive time as linear and fixed—what the Ancient Greeks referred to as chronos. In their suffering, Stability Types may feel walled off from the world. Working with them therapeutically often means trying to gently nudge them toward the opposite of their orientation: the fanciful, the irrational, the vulnerable, and maybe even flirting with irresponsibility and flakiness. They need to test the limits on how and why they live their lives, exploring what is motivating them day to day. Is it guilt or shame, or is it desire and passion? Is the life they’re living the life they want to be living?
I’ve found that trying to do useful psychotherapy with Stability Types like Mira can also often be confounding, given how tightly they can hold themselves. They may be proactive in seeking therapy, like they know it’s the next box to check. But once they walk through the door, they often want “practical” solutions. In my experience, an emphasis on cognitive work—psychoanalytic talk therapy or exercises for behavior modification—will usually stall out and feel demoralizing for the Stability Type Quarterlifer who was strongly hoping for some support in moving to the next unknown step. I sometimes feel as if I’m working against a clock, that we’ve got five sessions to turn their life around or they’re going to calculate the cost-benefit analysis and call it quits. But the search for one’s personal meaning is a long, circuitous journey, a deep exploration of what is, actually, not “practical” at all and for which there is no defined “next step.”
Stability Types may feel threatened by the noncognitive, less rational work because it is so unfamiliar to them. But they desperately need some measure of the very things that scare them the most: dreams, mystery, and curiosity about the unknown. They need to remember the enormity of existence—wilderness, the night sky, the universe— of which they are not in control. Trying to help them, then, often means trying to give them a taste of their true pursuit in some visceral way. It’s an effort to break out of the logical, linear, practical sphere and reintroduce them to something they may have felt, hopefully, in childhood. Sometimes, encouraging them to embrace art practices or other forms of creative exploration can help unearth these revelations. Other times, mystical and divinatory practices prove beneficial too. Mira’s spark was tied into her travels, so that was my focus and where our work began. I wanted to help Mira remember the ocean, what it felt like to be traveling alone, immersed in the waves, and not always in control.
Little by little, Mira and I developed a language together around her split between stability and meaning, and how she could take that necessary step toward meaning, mystery, and wildness. Meaning is the entire story waiting in between the secure covers of a book. Whereas stability is the feeling of safety and protection, meaning is the feeling of openness and connection. Finding this language early on helped Mira and me stay oriented when we lost our way, supporting us to come back to the memories and images that allowed her to feel the ocean, and her immersion in the world that she hoped, desperately, to experience again.
Have you read Quarterlife? What do you want to know more about? And who did you identify with most?
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, and director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, The New York Post, The Tamron Hall Show, Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, Literary Hub, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.
Just finished your book. Absolutely wonderful - genuinely one of the best, and most important, I've ever read. Thank you for capturing such an amorphous and essential topic with such grace and clarity.
I am in the mid-part of quarterlife and read your book earlier this year. It gave me deep validation and peace in what sometimes feels like a bumpy ride through life. I gifted the book to my mom who has passed it on to my dad and other friends. Deeply relatable wisdom – a gift that keeps on giving!!
I think what sticks out to me most is the concept of giving myself permission to explore. Permission to explore my body through consistent yoga practice. Permission to explore my creativity through painting and watercolor. Permission to explore my community and roots through friends, pottery class, loose ties in my neighborhood. Moving from a feeling that I should have figured it all out by now to acceptance that the questioning is all a part of the path has given me great hope. Thank you, Satya!