ON THE EDGE?

Inside millennial breakdown camp

Try to imagine the scene, if you will. I am dancing and chanting while simultaneously having to make very intense eye contact with six total strangers in a ballroom high up in the Spanish hills. The act of doing all three at once is bad enough, and that’s before I’ve caught sight of my reflection laughing back at me from the glare of the window. What am I doing here? What are we, half a dozen seemingly normal young women from across the UK, doing here? Let me explain.

We have gathered in a four-star hotel in the Spanish town of Benahavís to spend the next week meditating, practising yoga and eating vegan meals, while spiritually exorcising ourselves. Each one of us has paid £300 to be here, and dutifully filled in a very thorough application form. (‘Are you familiar with gluten-free, plant-based eating?’ No, no, I am not, but I can name every dessert from the Pizza Hut menu, if you like.) Our reasons for this trip vary, from the two 29-year-old women in post-break-up wilderness, to the 30-year-old managing director who

wants a career change and is feeling the pressure to get married. Yet we are all united in one thing: that we feel lost, cut adrift from the life path each of us thought we would travel. And so we have gathered here under the auspices of the retreat’s 29-year-old founder (bear with me, I’ll come onto her later) to seek spiritual guidance and life-affirming renewal. We have come, as the website puts it, because each of us believes we are experiencing ‘a quarter-life crisis.’

I’m 24 and am no stranger to a nervous breakdown (or three). Last year, I became so anxious I lost all feeling in the right side of my body for a week. Doctors told me it was due to stress-induced migraines or the secondary effects of anxiety and sent me away with a fistful of antidepressants (I only took them for a few weeks). Not long after, I headed home to my parents’ for Easter and cried relentlessly, refusing to eat or move out of the spare bedroom for four days straight. I remember calling my best friend and repeatedly saying, ‘I can’t look after myself any more, it’s too hard.’

I know what you’re thinking right about now: this is life in your twenties. It’s a decade defined by mess and malaise. Well, yes and no.

Every twentysomething throughout the course of history has felt pressure to succeed, but my generation seems to be crumbling under the burden harder and faster than our parents. Today’s twentysomethings report peak levels of loneliness and despondency. There are 3.3 million of us between 20 and 34 still living with our mum and dad (or, hell, even gran and

grandad). A quarter of graduates are unemployed for a year after getting their degree (making that debt of £25,000 feel totally worthwhile). There’s been a 165% increase in the prescription of antidepressants in England since 1998, while self-harm rates have trebled. And yet we’re labelled spoilt and indulged by those generations who have come before us; generations who have mortgages and pensions and ‘jobs for life.’

And so here I am, standing in front of a 29-year-old woman called Stephanie Kazolides. Who may or may not have the answer. Stephanie founded The Quarter Life Health Project last year, after having a post-university crisis of her own which left her, like me, bedbound. She tells me she recovered when her cousin introduced her to yoga, plant-based eating and she adopted a more holistic approach to health. I can feel my eyes rolling.

Last year she hosted seven weeklong retreats like this one, and received hundreds of applications from those who spotted her flyers strategically left in yoga classes or stumbled across reviews on health blogs. The course was so popular she had to turn away 30 people when the retreat initially launched, she tells me, sitting cross-legged atop a sea of white linen cushions.

We arrived some days earlier in dribs and drabs. Gemma*, a 29-year-old from Manchester, and I shared a ride from the airport together. She told me she teaches yoga part-time, alongside working as a freelance hair and make-up artist, but is basically here to take some time for herself away from juggling two full-on businesses and family life. I share a bunk bed in the communal dorm with a young woman from New Zealand called Charla*, who is also 29. Her UK visa will expire in a few months, and she has no idea what to do next. Steph says her usual clientele come from busy cities where they’re on the brink of burnout, and that she uses the questionnaire to check how openminded they’ll be during their stay.

Very deep breaths

“A quarter-life crisis often follows four stages and unfolds over several years,” Dr Oliver Robinson, a senior lecturer in psychology who has extensively researched mental health in emerging adulthood, told me from his office in the University of Greenwich before my trip. “I would say a breakdown is, albeit a non-technical term, something that happens during a crisis when a person feels they can’t manage and has to step back from their commitments for some time to regroup.”

I remember these words as Stephanie stands in front of the room and asks, “What does your soul yearn for?” We go around the room. Answers range from “love” to “freedom”, and when it’s my turn the word “companionship” inexplicably tumbles from my mouth. This is odd because I’m out with friends five nights a week, but I often go home alone and feel that something is missing. When it comes to men, I’m guilty of pushing the decent ones away, preferring ›

“Last year, I became so anxious I lost all feeling in the right side of my body for a week”

“I look around the room as we jerk to the music and wonder if this is what it feels like to be part of a cult”

instead to chase those who are almost always emotionally unavailable.

The next day, over a lunch of falafel and tahini (which we bless, naturally), a full-time kundalini yogi and holistic life coach called Nina* who, she informs us, has studied neurolinguistic programming, starts to share her story. She’s a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who used to run a plastic surgery clinic. She explains how she underwent intense training at a yogic research institute that “broke her down then rebuilt her into something stronger”. This, she says with a smile, is what she’ll be doing to us over the course of the week.

After lunch we have a lesson on the physical effects of stress on the nervous system, set to Punjabi beats. Nina bounces energetically on her yoga mat, shouting, “Keep going!” as we all try to “shake off” our tensions. I look around the room as we all rush and jerk to the music and wonder if this is what it feels like to be a part of a cult. The week continues in much the same way – we rise as one at 7am, and then head to breakfast. A plate of buckwheat pancakes precedes more chanting, before it’s time to “clean out our basements” (not a euphemism for vaginal steam-cleaning).

And then, on day three, something shifts. In a sage voice, Nina explains the main event of the retreat is performing a “mental inventory” on ourselves: dragging up painful memories to examine, then thrash out our feelings, in order to transcend them. It’s like clearing out your wardrobe, only you’re binning off emotional baggage rather than impulse Ebay purchases. (It follows a similar model to that of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step programme, I later learn.)

We’re asked to spend the day writing a list of 25 people (minimum) we’ve experienced negative feelings towards. You can include people you’re closest to, and can go back as many years as you’d like. Then you must ask a series of questions: ‘What did I do (if anything) to put myself in a position to be harmed and why?’ and ‘What was I seeking or gaining from the situation?’ Followed by ‘What is the truth of the situation?’ I head up to the mountains to stretch out and write my roll call.

After a couple of hours, my notebook contains three exboyfriends, a handful of flings, three family members and all the girls who were mean to me at school, plus a couple of friends. I discover it’s surprisingly easy to unearth negativity towards mankind. And that, right there, is the problem. I look down the list, and see names I haven’t thought about for years. Suddenly past experiences (the ex-boyfriend who held my arm against a radiator until it blistered; the thin-eyebrowed girl who threw stones at me after

school) begin to snap, crackle and pop around my brain like space-dust candy.

Most of these people, and the issues associated with them, were sealed years ago. Admittedly not always neatly, but they’ve been filed deep in my subconscious. And up until now, I’ve been OK with that. But now I find myself becoming both angry and upset as I stare at the names. It’s like lifting the lids off a row of boiling pots – and scalding yourself all over again.

Nina then instructs us to match our emotional response to the situations and names from a list of adjectives. We can choose from ‘inferior,’ ‘jealous,’ ‘judgemental,’ ‘hypocritical’ and over 20 others, then we have to write a ‘lesson and a blessing’ gained from each scenario. I write down the name of a casual acquaintance who instantly makes me grind my teeth. After analysing the situation, I realise that actually that’s problem – not hers. That situation arises because I’ve been ‘judgemental’ and quick to ‘anger’ around her in the past. As I head back to the hotel with a yoga mat slung over one shoulder, I spot one of the other women crying next to the swimming pool hunched over her journal. Gemma, meanwhile, is sitting cross-legged on the terrace and gives me a serene, silent wave.

Moving on

“You had bad dreams last night. Your breathing was panicked,” says Charla, towelling off her hair after a morning shower. Now I remember. I dreamed I’d broken into an ex-boyfriend’s house, got lost in the dark then desperately tried to “find everything I’d left behind” there. I feel emotionally hungover. Later in the week, I see I’m not the only one as many of the women break into tears during our daily meditation sessions, though weirdly I do not.

The retreat draws to an end. On our last day, Nina instructs us to put everything “back in the basement”. She asks us to imagine our life as a wheel with spokes (work, friends, relationships etc) coming out of it and in the centre of it all – in order to feel fulfilled – needs to be ourselves. There’s no eye rolling this time.

It’s dark outside and Nina is sitting by a bucket of burning fire blocks. One by one, we drop in our list of lessons from the week and dance like Kate Bush on the terrace, to celebrate our new freedom. As I twirl around for an hour with my eyes closed, the endorphin hit feels good. The other women make solemn pledges to continue meditating and practising yoga daily – and from social media, it looks as if they have. So maybe some young women do need a camp to teach them coping strategies. Me, less so. On the plane home, curled up under the leopard-print coat I thought necessary to bring to Spain, I wonder if what I experienced last year actually could be classed as a quarter-life crisis – or whether, more simply, it was just life.

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