It’s no secret that university students are a conflicted bunch. You’re likely to run into students struggling with mental health anywhere and everywhere, and it seems to be a common theme amongst all of us to struggle with our places in life. University is a hard time for students because it comes at an awkward stage of psychosocial development, which only makes dealing with university workloads harder. Part of the growth process is understanding where you are in life, and why you feel the way that you do. That’s why Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is so helpful: it explains that it’s normal to feel lost right now, and that you’re not alone!
Erikson separates life into eight distinct stages of social development. When we are adolescents, we undergo the period of identity versus role confusion. This stage of life, occurring generally between the ages of twelve and eighteen, is sometimes referred to as the “mirror-me” stage. This is because it’s the first time in our development that we’re taking a look at who we are and beginning to establish a permanent identity. We’re looking at ourselves in a mirror, trying to figure out what we like, what we don’t like, and what needs to be changed. This can get confusing—hence all of the angst running rampant throughout high school hallways. It’s not easy to establish a firm identity, and it takes a lot of learning, growth and confidence to emerge as a young adult who is ready to tell the world who they are.
After we establish our identities, we move into the intimacy versus isolation stage. This is when we ask ourselves questions like: How does my identity fit in with the people around me? How do I establish loving relationships? Figuring out who we are is just the first step—the next one is figuring out how that person can create intimate relationships with the people in their communities. Successfully navigating this stage means establishing close friendships, romantic relationships, and stable ties to other adults. This period of life lasts all the way to middle age!
The transition period between these stages is difficult because it’s hard to know when your identity has become permanent. It gets even harder when we factor in all of the troubles concerning Gen Z. With issues like inflation and increased housing costs, young adults are living at home for much longer than what was normal fifteen years ago. It’s not that young people don’t want to move out, but it’s that they can’t, and this impacts their ability to move into the intimacy stage of young adulthood. Furthermore, the overwhelming influence of social media means that we live two lives: one in real life, and one on our phones. How can we be positive in our identities when we’re working on establishing a real-time, interpersonal identity at the same time as cultivating an online presence? The identity stage of adolescence is doubly as difficult as it used to be because we need to figure out two separate versions of ourselves.
Let’s layer in another complication: the hardships that come with being a young woman in the online generation. It’s stuff we see everywhere, all the time: unattainable body standards, the critical male gaze, the pressure to fit into a certain “aesthetic.” It’s not that unattainable standards for women didn’t exist 100 years ago, it’s that those standards are being ingrained into your psyche every single time you open your phone. How can we figure out who we are and how to establish healthy relationships if we’re constantly being told that we aren’t good enough? That we don’t fit into the ideal of the worthy or the desirable? How do you decide who you are when no one is watching when you are constantly being watched?
Questions of identity and relationships have always been a point of struggle for young adults. The issues of our generation come with a new set of hardships, but understanding where we are in our processes of development makes growth easier and more intentional. Whether you’re still figuring out who you are, you’re fighting to establish healthy relationships, or you’re somewhere in the middle, we’re all in the same boat. But there’s good news, and it’s that anywhere you turn on campus, you’ll find someone who’s navigating the same grey area that you are. We’re in it together, and that makes the grey area just a little less grey.
