The Disorientation of your Mid-30s
You don't ask for it, but life only gets better after it.
Raw and Real Conversation
Last year I turned 34. And for over one year or so, I have been feeling what I have now come to call as the mid-thirties disorientation.
It is not depression.
It is disorientation. (Haha, I did not write it using ChatGPT, so chill :))
It is that one short phase of your life (that sometimes lasts a little longer than a year) where you are not fully yourself.
It is your brain at the bridge, of not being able to keep up with the person you were and the person you are becoming.
You are unknowingly dragging far from who you have been for the longest time. Yet you do not find it alien.
As much as you try to resist this life change, it is in a manner shattering everything you have been, but doesn’t serve you anymore. And another part of you is beginning to emerge on its own.
It is important that we talk about it here.
Before the mid-thirties disorientation, you are carrying on the do-more-get-more-done energy of your 20s. After this disorientation phase is over, you are going towards do-less-but-turn-things-to-gold energy into life.
In your 20s and early 30s, aka before this disorientation phase, you had nothing.
You worked so much and so hard to build everything you have now.
Career.
Money.
Network.
Internal stability.
The face that smiles even when the heart has broken 17th time during the day.
The tiny smile that unconsciously pops up when you see your nephew and niece struggle with career, because you know they will turn out fine.
The fact that you dealt with so many hells you hadn’t ever anticipated.
The innumerable times you saw a joyful relationship (and I’m not even talking romantic here) turn into non-existent, because hey, you were naive and did not understand how the real world functions.
It is something everyone goes through in their 20s and 30s, mostly unaware, yet they do.
It may manifest itself as a career shattering apart (in the moment) or feeling disconnected from who you are as a person or maybe making decisions that are not aligned with who you are.
Your parents were perhaps in their mid-thirties when they gave you the childhood trauma, effects of which are somehow visible to date
I also studied a lot of people I know in person and respect, who went through a similar valley of disorientation around similar age.
….
But this mid-thirties disorientation is a special place reserved only for driven, strong, focused, high achievers.
I call it disorientation because the other side of this mess is magnificence.
Priyanka Chopra once quoted Beyonce, saying, “I am on the other side of my sacrifice.” She meant she has worked hard enough ever since she was a 20 year old, that now she has crossed the bridge of sacrifice to supreme success, has gotten on the other side, and now she chooses her projects and the life she lives.
This disorientation is exactly that bridge.
Life is different for everyone. And this disorientation is something no-one can prepare you for. You will only know once you have passed that bridge.
I have been going through that for over last one year or so. It has been a messy year, to say the least. I appear put together but almost everything is shattering apart.
So much so that the 3 days I have had in the last 365 days when nothing was falling apart, I wondered if life was supposed to be so easy!
It was precisely the reason I did not do the year-end review at the end of 2025. I was so disoriented that I could not convince myself to put a mask and tell you “here are the things that happened in my life”.
Everything was externally good — the career, the success, the family time, the joys of life — but you know in your heart you are internally falling apart. Which is what even I was going through for a long time.
But a part of me now feels things are coming together for good.
You cannot point out how, but you know in your heart.
…
On the other side of this sacrifice, on the other side of this disorientation, is something you had never expected. Something so distant that you had even forgotten that it existed.
You now start experiencing a childlike joy.
Some of which also manifests as:
You stop explaining to others when they feel bad of the right things you do. Their intent of feeling bad is too much about them and not about you. “Ja bhai, khush ho ja tu agar bura maanne se tujhe khushi milti hai to. I am so done with explaining myself hazaar baar.”
You altogether stop trying in certain relationships, which have always taken you for granted. It is not a way of seeking revenge from them, it is just accepting that some people do not want you but your constant unasked validation.
You now become a person everyone loves, but no one really knows.
You even become funny, because you have experienced everything else, honey.
With me, I have also never felt such need to dance and jump with joy at the tiny things, as I have been feeling for the past several weeks.
After this disorientation, you only do things that matter to you, instead of saying yes perpetually. Your productivity, money, career, health — everything you touch turns to gold.
When failure does arrive, it least bothers you. You know you are beyond that, so you navigate it like a pro. When success arrives, you are proud of yourself but you do not let it get to your head. Your only success now is staying true to yourself. Not a lot of people understand this. But you don’t care anymore either.
This other side of the disorientation phase, is a fearless and a joyful human, that has a special power that can make anything happen. And not care about everything they do not want to make happen.
…
Just that this shattering of your mid-30s that lasts a little longer than you thought, takes a lot from you. It tests your patience, it tests your self-confidence, it tests every ounce of courage you did not even know existed in you.
Yet you simply let go of the stains of the end of the day, brush them off, get up next morning, dress up and show up.
The world thinks you are so put together, but the world was never ever right about their perception of you anyway.
…
It reminds me of the Murakami quote:
"And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
….
The mid-30s disorientation is like puberty. Earlier or before, it hits everyone.
It is not the end of life. Just the beginning of a whole new, lighter, happier, richer, more joyful life.
For those who are on the pre-side of this disorientation find this daydreaming. If you are there, you might perhaps not even understand a lot of what I am speaking about.
But the ones on the other side of their sacrifice, on the other side of their disorientation, are wilfully nodding their heads to this :)
2 Raw One-Liners:
Quiet is the new cool.
Money can’t buy taste. You must acquire it.
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That’s all my friend for this weekend.
A part of me had been aching to write today’s Raw and Real for the longest time, just that I did not know it had to be written :) Such is the art :))
I will see you next Saturday.
Nishtha Gehija
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