How do those two even begin to compare, right? The answer is: balance. What circus performers and successful workaholics have in common, is the ability to multitask while having fun. But getting it right is, of course, pretty tough.

Going back to my 5-year-old self, I pretty much knew what I wanted to do: perform tricks on horseback. And though it seemed like I had it all figured out, I was asked to factor in another variable, location. Like most Balkan generation Y-ers, I was told that I should be serious. I was to think of a career path that would lead me straight to earning plenty of money, gaining independence and escaping my parents’ destiny: getting stuck in transition.

Yet, being in transition affected me just as much as it did them.

Being the first generation after ’89 that doesn't remember life before democracy, gen Y-ers are constantly trying to live up to some distantly vague expectations. We’re really stuck on the crossroads between the far West and the immediate East. We’ve played in our grandparents’ attic-museums of communism, and we’ve watched democracy on Cartoon Network. But we haven’t experienced either first hand. We live in the Great In-Between, dreaming globally, but confined to acting locally. So we feel more stuck in the middle, rather than balancing.

Graduating to a financial crisis and offices whose outdated dynamics challenge the space-time continuum, we are forced to adapt to something no celebrated trans-Atlantic self-help book even begins to cover: the Balkan quarter-life crisis. It’s a dead-end feeling of desperation, anger and helplessness; the fear you cannot go on, but that there’s also nothing to go back to. And though we want to do more, we’re strangely unsure as to what that more is since we don’t have the know-how.

Educated from the big books of the past, we learned how to fear change, as it only happened to ruin the good things we had going… 500-600 years ago. Much like characters in a Woody Allen movie, we prefer to seek comfort in thoughts of distant eras. But that rarely results in finding our own balance, because it’s a word in present tense.

There’s really nothing wrong with wanting to change the world. Acting locally does not always refer to recycling your trash, it can also refer to upcycling your fears. No self-respecting character on Cartoon Network ever gives up, no matter how many times he runs off a cliff; which is mostly why we loved them, right? Thus, as conversations about panic attacks and stress are becoming the new weather talk, I wonder if finding your own balance doesn’t involve a pair of ear plugs, a bucket of candy and a blank To Do list.

While I wonder, I think I’m going to try and enjoy these interesting transitional times. Because I never ran away with the circus, but I learned to enjoy multitasking nevertheless.

The article was originally written in English.

Illustration: Ana Gomez

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