There's a name for what happens in your early 20s when you graduate university/college and suddenly realize that you have no idea what you're doing.
Quarter-life crisis. People talk about it, joke about it, and make TikToks about it.
And then there's the midlife crisis. Everyone knows that one. I don’t even have to explain it.
But what about the thing that happens in between?
Welcome to the third life crisis. The thrisis.
Maybe it was always a thing, but I just didn’t know about it until I started experiencing it myself.
I never really hear anyone talk about it because it doesn't come with a fun stereotype or a clear trigger. It just kind of... shows up. Quietly. While you're doing dishes, scrolling your phone at 11pm or sitting in your car in the driveway for an extra five minutes before walking into the house to work after work.
It's the crisis of being in your late 20s or early 30s and realizing that the life you built, the one you worked REALLY hard for and looks good on paper, doesn't feel the way you thought it would.
I want to be careful here because I'm not writing this from some place of resolution. I don't have it figured out. I'm writing this from the middle of it, which is kind of the whole point of this newsletter.
Here’s where I’m at
I'm 30-something. I'm on mat leave with my second kid. I've been a marketer for over ten years. I have a career that, by most measures, I should be proud of. And I am. But there's this other thing sitting underneath the pride that I can't quite shake.
It's this feeling of... is this it?
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a "burn it all down" way. More like a slow, quiet wondering. Like, I did the thing. I got the degree (and a diploma, yay), I built the career, I got the house, I had the kids. I checked the boxes.
So why do I feel like something is missing?
Don’t get me wrong though. I’m extremely appreciative and grateful of everything that I’ve worked for and have in my life. There’s nothing I’d change because I genuinely love life, but there’s something I can’t exactly explain? I just can’t really put my finger on it.
Ok so our 20s are a blur of building. At least mine were.
I was hustling constantly. I started a blog back in 2015 because I loved writing and I wanted to build my portfolio. I freelanced. I climbed. I said yes to everything. I was hungry in that way you can only be when you're young and don't have anyone depending on you yet. Every opportunity felt like it could be the one that changed everything, and honestly, some of them were.
There's an energy to your 20s that I don't think you can replicate. You're building from nothing and it's terrifying, but also kind of thrilling. You don't know what you don't know, which is a superpower when you're starting out. You just go.
And then at some point, you arrive. Or you think you do.
You get the job, the promotion, the salary, or whatever marker you were chasing. And there's this moment where you expect to feel... done? Settled? Like you can finally exhale.
But the exhale doesn't come. Or it does, and then a week later you're restless again.
Motherhood <> thrisis
I think motherhood accelerates the thrisis in a way that catches you completely off guard.
Because here's the thing about having kids… Having kids doesn't just change your schedule, your body or your sleep. But it completely changes your relationship with yourself.
Before kids, my identity was pretty straightforward. I was a marketer, a writer, and someone who was building a career. I knew who I was in a room and I knew what I was working toward.
After kids? I genuinely didn't know how to answer the question "what do you do?" anymore.
Because technically I’m on mat leave, but I also run an Etsy shop, and I'm building a personal brand online, and I'm still a marketer, but I'm also just... a mom standing in her kitchen at 2pm wondering when she last had a thought that wasn't about someone else's needs.
Motherhood cracks you open. And all the questions you were too busy to ask in your 20s come flooding in. What do I actually want? Not what was I supposed to want. Not what looks good.
I didn't expect mat leave to be the thing that forced me to confront that question. I thought it would be a pause. A “rest”. Well, not really because when do mothers actually rest? When can we actually sleep when the baby sleeps?
Instead it became this strange, disorienting space where I had just enough time to think and just enough distance from my career to realize I'd been running on autopilot for longer than I wanted to admit.
There’s no urgency though
The thrisis is tricky because it doesn't feel urgent enough to act on. It's not a breakdown. It's not rock bottom. It's more like a persistent hum in the background of your days.
You can ignore it. Most people do, for a while. You stay busy, you keep going, you tell yourself this is just what adulthood feels like.
But it's not just adulthood. It's a specific kind of reckoning that happens when you've been building long enough to step back and ask whether you're even building the right thing.
And I think a lot of women in particular experience this quietly. Because we've been told that wanting more is greedy, or that questioning a good life is ungrateful, or that being a mom should be enough. So we swallow the restlessness and keep going.
I don't think the answer is to quit your job or blow up your life. I also don't think the answer is to just be grateful and push through. I think the answer is somewhere in the messy middle, which, again, is kind of the whole premise of this newsletter.
What am I building?
I started building all of this, whatever this is, during mat leave because I need something that is mine. Not my employer's. Not my family's. Mine.
A corner of the internet where I could write, create and think out loud about the things I’m going through that I’m sure many of you can relate with.
That's what the thrisis does. It makes you reach for something, even when you don't know what you're reaching for yet.
I'm still in it. I want to be honest about that. I don't have a tidy ending for this essay because I don't have a tidy ending for this season of my life.
I'm going back to work in the new year. I'm raising two small humans. I'm running a greeting card shop, building a personal brand, writing this newsletter and just trying to figure out what actually want my life to look like on the other side of all this.
Some days that feels exciting. Some days it feels overwhelming. Most days it feels like both at the same time.
If you're reading this and something in it sounds familiar, I want you to know that you're not being dramatic. You're not ungrateful. You're not having a crisis in the way anyone else needs to understand or validate.
You're just in the in-between. And the in-between is uncomfortable, but it's also where all the good stuff gets built.
You're not alone in it.
With love,
Sally