Millennial Malaise
A short
The relentless swell of anonymity enveloped her. The waves, reminders of lost dreams and wasted potential, crashed down around her. She was drowning in a sea of mediocrity. Of unremarkability. She wasn’t particularly pretty. Not ugly, but definitely not a head turner. She was smart, but not smart enough to matter. She simply existed, her presence not really noteworthy except as another statistical tick mark. Even the way she was lost was unremarkable.
She could feel the weight of the world bearing down on her, which was ironic since the world barely knew she existed. This was not the way her life was supposed to have gone. She is a joke. A jumbled up cliché of millennial angst. She remembers back to when her life made sense, when she knew what she was doing and where she was going. When she had purpose and drive and commitment. When she had promise.
Back then, she knew who she was. She knew what she wanted, and she thought she knew how to get it—or at least she knew she would figure it out. She was confident it would all work out.
She was supposed to be married by now, the first of a few kids on the way. Her career flourishing. Somehow, she would have the perfect work/life balance. She was supposed to be happy.
“Are those still things you want?” asks Maggie, interrupting her reverie.
Maggie is her therapist. Maggie is her antithesis. Maggie is a wildly successful therapist, happily married to a wonderful man. Maggie is gorgeous, but in an understated, natural way. Maggie’s hair and make up (if you can even call it make up, Maggie only wears lip gloss) are always flawless. Maggie is kind and considerate, especially when it comes to her patients. Maggie is the epitome of perfection, inside and out. Maggie’s the kind of perfect that it is painful to be around. Normally, she would hate Maggie. And yet, Maggie is so skillful, it’s never been an issue.
There is a pause while she considers Maggie’s question. “I don’t know,” she admits. There is the slightest beat before, “no. That’s not true. I do know. I do want all those things, but not quite in the same ways I used to.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Maggie starts but is cut off.
“I know, people change and grow, it’s not a bad thing,” she recites. She pretends to blow this off, to dismiss it as a platitude, but she knows it’s true. “It’s not that…when I was younger I…”
She was supposed to go to med school. She was going to be a brilliant surgeon by day and a successful badass rocker by night. That had been the plan—or at least that had been the plan when she was still young enough not to be bothered by the pesky constraints of reality. She could have easily gotten into med school. She was smart. Her strength lay in her unique perspective, her understanding of nuance, and her ability to see the big picture where most people couldn’t. But she wasn’t particularly studious, and her brand of intelligence had a knack for lending itself to existential crises. It was a problem.
She was always going to be a musician. That was something that would never change. The one constant in a suddenly inconstant life. She had been a musician her entire life. It was part of her identity. It was in her blood.
Even when she did entertain the idea of other interests, she always came back to music—which is how you get a surgeon-by-day-musician-by night. It might be ludicrous, but back then, anything was possible. Luckily, she had realized the impracticality of this before even reaching high school.
©️Sara Mozersky 2025