30 Isn't Coming to Get You
The most alarming thing about turning 30 is how alarmed everyone else is about it.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. People genuinely mean well when they project their complicated feelings about aging onto you at get togethers and in the comments of your birthday posts. But at some point in your mid-twenties, everyone around you starts doing math on your life that you didn’t ask for. Are you where you thought you’d be? Do you have the job? The relationship? The savings account that doesn’t make you want to close the app immediately?
Here’s how I think of it: we have only been adults for ten years. Ten. If adulthood were a career, we’d still be figuring out the unwritten rules and wondering why nobody covered them during orientation.
Your 20s are, and I say this with full love, baby adult years. You’re running on a combination of ambition and anxiety and very little of what anyone would call actual experience. You’re making decisions with maybe 10% of the information you’ll eventually have. And somehow we’re all supposed to have it wrapped up before the clock hits midnight on our 30th birthday.
I’m not buying it.
I turn 30 in February. Instead of feeling behind, I’ve started thinking about this last year of my 20s as three things at once: a celebration of what I’ve built, a funeral for the parts of myself that give me the ick, and the foundation for everything that comes next.
The celebration is real. I stuck to a budget this year in a way that finally felt sustainable instead of punishing. I’ve been putting money toward the life I actually want instead of spending it on a version of my life I was performing for other people. (That’s a sentence that took me 29 years to be able to write without cringing.)
The funeral is equally real. There are patterns I’ve let myself get away with for too long. Ways I’ve shown up in friendships, in my own head, in my habits, that I’m officially done excusing. I’m not going to list them all here because I have some dignity left, but you know the feeling. The ick you get about yourself when you’re being completely honest at 1am. That stuff.
The foundation is the part I’m most excited about. I’ve spent the last couple of years getting better at choosing the right people. Not the ones who look good in a group photo, not the ones who seem “cool” to everyone else in whatever circle I thought I wanted to be in, but the people I’m genuinely myself around. The ones who make me want to be better, not different. This feels like something I’m building on for the first time instead of starting from scratch.
I think when people warn you about 30, they’re really just projecting their own regret about how they spent their 20s. Which I get. But I’d rather go into the last year of this decade with my eyes open than spend it anxious about an imaginary deadline.
30 isn’t coming to get you. It’s just coming.
♡ Syd