Column: The ‘What Am I Doing?’ Crisis
[Column written by Nadia Arandjelovic]
There is something about a birthday that ends in a zero; or a big career milestone; or watching your children reach an age – that makes you suddenly realise how quickly time is moving.
You can be perfectly fine one minute and then, seemingly out of nowhere, find yourself asking: Is this really what I want?
I know that question well. At 25, I left my job as a newsroom reporter at The Royal Gazette and went backpacking for three months. I spent time volunteering in Nepal and exploring through Thailand, with a quick weekend in Singapore thrown in for good measure.
At 29 [on the cusp of turning 30], I left journalism altogether and started my own PR business.
At 35, I packed up my life in Bermuda and moved with my family to Southeast Asia.
And now, at 39 [a few months before my 40th Birthday], I am in the middle of another significant career pivot, building a life coaching business that supports women navigating their own next chapters.
None of those decisions happened because I had my entire life mapped out. They happened because, at different points, I stopped and asked myself some version of the same question: Am I content with where I am?
And sometimes, the answer was a little complicated. Because questioning your life doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unhappy. You can be grateful for your job and still wonder if you want to do something different. You can love your family and still wonder what happened to the parts of yourself that existed before motherhood. You can have achieved goals you once dreamed about and still feel a little restless. You can look around at your life and think, I should be happy. So why am I wondering what else is out there?
I think we have become very good at treating these moments of questioning as something that needs to be fixed.
The quarter-life crisis. The mid-life crisis. The existential crisis.
But perhaps questioning isn’t always a crisis. Perhaps sometimes it is simply information. Life changes us. Our priorities, circumstances and definition of success changes. And the things we wanted at 25 may not be the things we want at 35, 45 or 55.
That doesn’t mean our younger selves got it wrong. It means we grew. And growth sometimes requires us to reassess the life we built with an earlier version of ourselves.
One of the questions I often encourage women to consider is surprisingly simple: If nothing changed for the next five years, how would you feel? Imagine you are in the exact same place in September 2031. Same career, same daily routine, same relationships, would you feel relieved? Content? Excited?
Or does something inside you quietly say, Oh, I don’t think I want that.
There’s no right answer. The point isn’t to convince yourself that you need to make a dramatic change. It is to pay attention.
Maybe the answer is that you’re already fulfilled and simply need to appreciate what you’ve built. Maybe there are a few things you would like to change. Or maybe you’ve been ignoring a desire for something different because you’re afraid of what acknowledging it might require.
When I look back at my own decisions, I don’t see a perfectly planned journey. I see a series of moments when I became curious enough to ask what was next.
Backpacking. Entrepreneurship.An international move with my family. A career change.
Different chapters, but the same woman trying to build a life that felt increasingly like her own.
So if you’re approaching a milestone—or simply sitting in the middle of an ordinary workday wondering, Is this it?—don’t immediately panic. Resist the urge to label it a crisis.
Instead, get curious. What is this feeling trying to tell you? What still fits? What no longer does? And what might you want to do differently with the years ahead?
You don’t have to have the answers immediately. But you owe yourself the honesty of asking the questions.
- Nadia Laws is a coach focused on helping women navigate life transitions, find clarity and build what’s next. If you’re wondering what your next chapter could look like, start with her free Rebuild Clarity Audit here.
