We lost a coming of age rite of passage – but found something even better

OPINION: In February 2020, I was convinced I was having a breakdown.

It wasn't just me, so many of my friends and other twenty-somethings were similarly overwhelmed that sociologists gave it a cute new name, the Quarter Life Crisis.

If you haven't heard of it, the QLC is the younger, poorer cousin of the midlife crisis. It involves much of the same paralytic fear about who you are (i.e. you don't know, and even if you do you've wasted your life not being it.) But for us it's also compounded by growing up in the era of millennial burnout, youth mental health crisis and digital rubbernecking of social media.

So however chipper our instagram exteriors looked, many of us were thinly veiled nervous wrecks. We were all planning to do what disorientated young people always do. Move overseas. Many of us had already gone, leaving stragglers enviously scrolling through self discovery pics in foreign bars, clubs and co-working spaces with jaunty neon signs.

READ MORE: My month off alcohol turned into two-and-a-half years An ode to the coronavirus memes, which may just save us all Marriage, and crisis communication, in the time of coronavirus

I was supposed to be off on my OE in August, planned to move to Sydney on my return, and was working multiple exhausting, but exciting, hospo jobs to save for it.

Then covid hit. And very soon it was clear that I would not be finding myself in Europe, Sydney, or in fact anywhere except the bed, the couch, and (when I felt like a treat) a hot shower.

But then it became even clearer that this was the least of our concerns. Far from being 6 weeks of baking banana bread, lockdown was a whole new kind of pandemonium.

Previously in the gig economy, many of us had a patchwork of badly paying individual jobs which, when strung together, you can live off. The variety kept things interesting – we were digital gunslingers rocking up to wild saloons with our iPhones.

Overnight that flexible job network, and it's sense of self-determination, evaporated.

Those of us like me who topped up a regular part-time job with entertainment gigs and freelancing suddenly found ourselves unemployed.

Yes, the contractor subsidy saved us. But the cash flow gaps still found me swallowing my pride, moving in with my partner (who's in hospitality and was similarly panicking) and eventually borrowing money off my parents like a red-faced teenager.

I felt even worse for my friends who didn't have parental safety nets or had no family in New Zealand, or were nannying for extra cash or working in bars where tips were a big part of their income. Their jobs evaporated as wealthier couples reined in household spending and venues stayed shut. And much of my lockdowns were spent sending out care packages to struggling friends.

You can imagine what weeks of staring at the ceiling did for that pre-existing fug of confusion, panic and disorientation. When I'd worked out how me and my friends would eat each week, I moped around like a lemon, guiltily mourning my lost coming of age rites.

But something weird happened. One day in September, the restless, chaotic, itchy nothingness of it all broke and it felt like waking up from a fever dream.

Out of nowhere, my quarter life crisis had lifted.

Yes, lockdown body-slammed us all into a wall. But it also squeezed out of us answers we'd been chasing for years. And I had the blisteringly, beautiful clarity of knowing who I was, who I cared about, and what I was prepared to fight for.

So it turns out I didn't need to run away anywhere. Who'd have thought it, but you can actually find yourself in the square meters between the couch, bed and shower.