DIARY

The Confusing Promises of Emerging Adulthood

My year of embracing the unknown in London.

By Esme Bale ☆ Issue 1, Spring 2025

Esme on her last day in London. Photo by Ella Cuba.

One year ago, I was in my hometown, Montreal, a recent university graduate, lost and confused. 

“What are you thinking of doing next?” everyone asked.  

I’d give a different answer each time, trying to hide the panic in my voice. I could work in communications, pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, or choose a safer master’s degree, like Education, and become an English teacher, circling through the same dozen classics for eternity. 

Every possibility I came up with sounded wrong coming out of my mouth. I wanted them to answer their own question and tell me what to do next. I couldn't admit that. I did not want to be perceived as failing, or worse, aimless. 

“I’m moving abroad to London, to become an au pair.” 

The minute I gave this answer, no matter how much doubt and fear I experienced, I knew I had to follow through with my decision. I planned my move to London in four months, keeping momentum by telling myself it would be too embarrassing to back out now. No one could claim I had no direction if I was going somewhere different.

I no longer wanted to hear how so-and-so got into law school or how another so-and-so had moved in with her boyfriend. Rather than compare, I would take myself out of the game. I landed in London with hopes that it would be a temporary refuge, where my physical surroundings would force a transformation within myself emotionally and intellectually.  

After googling about the quarter life crisis during sleepless nights in my new home, I learned my experience aligns with psychological theories of development regarding identity formation. One such framework is the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, which he proposed in the 20th century. According to Erikson, individuals face a series of crises throughout their lifespan, with adolescence marked by the struggle between identity and role confusion. To resolve this crisis, people need to establish who they are, defining their purpose while integrating this new sense of self with their physical changes and outside influences. 

Even though I had a supportive friend group in Montreal, I knew I needed to leave. I couldn’t risk the chance of being seen by people who truly knew me, and would be able to tell that I was in crisis.

Erikson’s stages fed my fear that I was behind. I was in my early twenties and still undecided about my future and purpose. If I am unable to form a unique sense of identity, I risk role confusion, preventing me from moving forward to the next stage, intimacy versus isolation. In London, with no friends and a job where I interacted primarily with a baby and a toddler, I had never spent so much time alone. I wasn’t growing intellectually. I had stopped writing. I found it difficult to forge new meaningful connections when I didn’t feel like a person worth knowing. A move that had sounded expansive in theory left me feeling more interior than ever. I worried that I would stay in this stage forever. 

I was hoping to find a scientific explanation for my hesitancy to move forward. During adolescence, I had found comfort knowing my body and brain were constantly changing. My emotional instability and bad decisions could be blamed on something as simple as physiology. As an adult, I couldn’t give myself the permission to be struggling. I wanted an authoritative figure to tell me I was normal, and that all would work out with time. 

I was relieved when I discovered the work of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist who, in 2000, coined the term emerging adulthood. Arnett makes the case for a new developmental stage, arguing that the transition from adolescence to adulthood is now long enough to be considered a distinct period in itself. He claims that the identity exploration discussed in Erikson’s theory takes place during our twenties. My discovery of Arnett gave me something I hadn’t known I needed, the ability to reframe my struggles as developmentally appropriate. 

Most people my age feel like they are no longer a teenager but not yet an adult. It is the age of in-between, a time to try different possible lifestyles, jobs, relationships, hobbies and ideologies. With increasing independence, your twenties are supposed to be a period where you can focus on yourself while developing the necessary tools you’ll need in adult life. I didn’t feel ready to get a “big girl” job or to apply to grad school. In the span of a seven-hour flight, I had uprooted my entire life. My parents no longer had the authority to make me stay. I didn’t have a job I couldn’t let go. I didn’t have a boyfriend to leave behind. 

Due to all the instability, anxiety and depression rates are often high within emerging adults. They can find themselves overwhelmed and directionless, having to use their discernment to sift through potential identities. After a couple of months, I came to the conclusion that London had rejected me. I was a houseguest that had overstayed their welcome. I was trying so hard to integrate myself into its ecosystem, and yet no matter what I did, I felt like an intruder. Out for drinks at a pub, someone would ask me how I’m finding London. 

“It’s great,” I’d say, as an attempt to protect my ego.

I had been rejected by a person before, more than once, but to be rejected by a city was a pain that I didn’t know how to express. It felt given to me from an indescribable higher power. This wasn’t simply a matter of opinion, of someone liking me or not. If one place can reject me, could it spread elsewhere until I have nowhere to go? 

I was conflicted about my non-attachment. I knew it was a luxury, a pure form of my freedom. Still, I fantasized about someone begging me to come back to Montreal. I gave an ultimatum to the city I grew up in, waiting for proof that it needed me, or at the very least, wanted me. In London, I waited to meet a boy who would fall in love with me and ask me to stay, a thread that could anchor me down to this world, stopping me from floating away. 

In reality, I know London did not reject me, I rejected it. In my experience of emerging adulthood so far, I have conflated independence and free will with loneliness and aimlessness. I continue to struggle to find the distinctions between them. It is a privilege to have the time to be lost, and yet, I kept wishing to be found already. I blamed outside forces, even intangible ones, for my discomfort. I am terrified by how much control I have. I am not at risk of floating away, needing a mass to pull me down. I am coming to terms with the fact that the only person who can ground me in a space is myself. 

For now, I am trying to focus on the fact that emerging adulthood is only a period of life. In the grand scheme, it is a brief one. I will, with time, become more at ease with myself and my power. The only way I will survive my twenties is by holding onto hope that even through all the instability and change, one day I will procure a life for myself I find harder to leave.