Lara Tlass Ojjeh arrived a little late for our meeting at a café near Place de la République in Paris. She sits down apologetically, looking slightly panicked, before putting her denim jacket embroidered with Mickey patterns on the back of her seat. “I’m so sorry, my head was spinning in the metro”, she explains, trying to come to her senses. The first anxiety attacks happened exactly a year ago – this feeling of being hot, cold, having trouble breathing for no apparent reason. “This Covid story, I still haven’t been able to get used to it. I, who was already a bit of a basic maniac, I became obsessed with the idea of protecting myself, putting on gel, respecting barrier gestures. I’m afraid of transport, I hate the idea that there are lots of people who can contaminate me, that I don’t have control over my environment. »
For the past few months, Lara has given up certain habits: “Before, I used to party a lot, but it’s over, because it worries me too much to be with strangers, to drink, to lose control”, she assures, stirring the straw in her glass of Coke. Her circle of friends is now more restricted, limited to a few relatives who really understand her. At the moment, she works as a waitress and community manager in a Parisian restaurant, without much passion, still lives with her mother in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine) and tries in vain to find an apartment to leave the family nest. . On a daily basis, she says she is very affected by the “disaster” news that reaches her on her phone screen between two TikTok and Instagram notifications: “The war in Ukraine, the fires all over France, that stresses me out a lot”she adds.
We knew the midlife crisis, theorized by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1963, and its most stereotyped representations: existential questions, divorce, sudden urge to drop everything to go raise goats or take up extreme sports. In recent years, the press and sociologists have been interested in another period of turbulence: the crisis of the twenties. In 2001, American authors Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner popularized the concept of “quarter-life crisis” with the book Quarterlife Crisis, The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties (TarcherPerigee, untranslated). Among the most common symptoms: the difficulty of knowing what place one wants to occupy in society, the impression of not having the shoulders to assume one’s responsibilities, the feeling that entering the world of adults is only an endless series of disappointments.
You have 81.68% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.