I Had A Midlife Crisis In My 30s While I Was Working My Dream Job — 'Came Without Any Warning'
A story of losing control, rewriting ambition, and learning how to be okay in the in-between.
Dean Drobot | Canva I was expecting some signs. You know, the classic “midlife crisis” markers they talk about — hitting your 40s or 50s, questioning your worth, your choices, and the point of it all after years of grinding in a stable career.
I thought it would arrive with burnout, some emotional breakdown, or at least a dramatic pause where I would ask, “What am I doing with my life?”
What I was not expecting was that this feeling of drenching in ‘identity crash’ or ‘existential dread’ would come when I was starting my life in my early 30s, newly married and happy, working in the dream job I had always wanted, and building the beautiful life I had always dreamed of.
But it came anyway. Silently. Without any warning or dramatic entries or postcards. Somewhere between watching my once-thriving career burn to ashes and folding laundry in the silence of my home, I realized I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror anymore.
Not because of the visible scars left behind by cancer. But because of the invisible ones: the mental bruises, the identity crash, the quiet grief of not knowing who I was now.
I was having a midlife crisis in my thirties.
fizkes / Shutterstock
The unseen crash no one warns you about
It wasn’t the big moments that broke me, like my cancer diagnosis on the day of my husband’s birthday, or the treatment that ripped every part of my body and soul, or the haunting thought: ‘Will I ever be the same as I was before the treatment?’
It was the quiet moments: the small, hidden battles beneath the tears from painful treatments or the forced smile of pretending to be strong. Like sitting at the dining table, staring at a to-do list that once made me feel empowered but had now been reduced to ‘cook rice,’ ‘finish laundry,’ ‘take meds,’ and ‘don’t cry before lunch.’
Moments like scrolling past job updates and those “I am happy to announce posts” from ex-colleagues and wondering if they remembered I ever existed in those meetings or smiling at relatives asking, “So when are you getting back to work?” and pretending the question didn’t feel like a dagger wrapped in concern.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I got a list of dos and don’ts from my doctors to my family on how to take care of me. Everyone warned me about the painful journey and the recovery, but no one warned me about the kind of grief — of watching your older version wither away piece by piece in front of your eyes as the rest of the world moves on without you.
What was confusing to me and to others who have faced similar struggles was this part. “I am technically okay now. I survived the battle and the health scare. I’m stable, walking on my feet, managing work, and a fully functional individual now. But inside, it still feels like something cracked, and it will never fully reset.”
When survival doesn’t feel like living
Daniel Hoz / Shutterstock
It’s strange how people clap when you survive something, but no one tells us what to do with the ‘version of us’ that survived. The world celebrates you for being “brave,” and “strong,” and “inspirational” and then quietly expects you to get back to life and to return to the same routine, the same dreams, the same metrics of success as if you’re not walking around in a body that understands what it wants or where to go from here.
And that’s when the real confusion begins. Okay, I am better now, healed and fit, but life just skipped three years without a career or identity, leaving a wide blank under my “ What do I do now” section.
So, now what? What am I supposed to do? Won’t someone hand me a playbook? It’s hard to explain what it feels like when your body is healing, your blood reports are normal, your life looks functional from the outside… but something inside you still feels missing.
Not broken. Not depressed. Just… not whole. It was hard to put a label on me — whether to call it trauma, grief, burnout, or just the wear and tear of being a woman who’s been through too much too soon.
I was not the only one chosen for this dramatic event, figuring out why I was feeling like this. There are people out there who don’t know what’s happening to them sometimes when they are hit by similar feelings at a defined age or not, and that’s what everyone calls a midlife crisis.
What is a midlife crisis — really?
It took me months to realize I wasn’t having a breakdown or was just clueless. I was caught in a perfectly documented midlife dip somewhere on that U-curve, just earlier than expected. According to economist Hannes Schwandt, who studied life satisfaction across ages and countries, most people experience a natural decline in happiness during midlife — even when nothing objectively terrible happens.
The U-curve says this: we’re relatively happy in our 20s, then things dip in our 40s, and eventually, satisfaction rises again as we age. Why? Because when we’re young, we carry around inflated expectations — that by our 30s or 40s, life will feel sorted. Settled. Fulfilled.
But often, it doesn’t. Because that’s life.
And when our reality doesn’t match the mental blueprint we’ve carried for years, we start to feel it — the dissatisfaction, the restlessness, the fog. That annoying feeling of being stuck in a life that doesn’t feel like ours anymore.
Now, the midlife crisis has been up for debate for a long time, whether it is even a thing or just another emotional marketing gimmick. But here’s the thing: putting a name on an emotion might be debatable.
But the emotion itself? It’s real. It lives in our bodies. It drains us quietly. And every day, the question of who we are now and what we want anymore spreads a chill through our bones.
The slow grief of the in-between
fizkes / Shutterstock
The hardest part of the crisis is not the collapse but the aftermath. A part which feels like an in-between of two phases, where technically things seem to be improving, yet the growth feels invisible.
I felt stuck in some time loop where I could neither move forward nor go back to the older version of me. It’s a weird feeling, neither sad nor depressing nor exciting or happy, more like numb.
But eventually, something shifted slowly. No, I did not figure out things, but I got tired of being stuck in the loop. The rebel inside me wanted to step out of this rut.
It was not some “Aha” moment, but quiet moments of change. Like opening a blank page and dumping thoughts that made no sense or watching YouTube videos that had nothing to do with my career but made me feel alive again, or finding peace in the new “to-do list” and ways to feel complete with who I am.
There was still no clarity or motivation, but tiny movements. A tiny ripple of life that said, “I’m still here.”
That small part that still hoped for a better future and wanted to look for pieces that kept me alive and kicking and rebuilding a new life, rather than grieving the old. And somewhere in between those messy notebooks, bad ideas, half-baked attempts at creating content, and failed routines, I started to feel like a human again.
I saw a small ray of hope that, after a long time, I was indeed climbing the curve again, slowly, quietly, but surely, towards happiness.
Shruti Mangawa is a writer, content creator, and former Area Sales Manager rebuilding her life and career after a long break. She explores the intersection of AI, human behavior, and reinvention in modern work and life through her newsletter "The Mind Catalyst", and YouTube channel, and loves to write personal essays on Medium to explore her writing.
