turning 30

last night, I got younger. the dread of turning 30 lifted from my shoulders as I went from being someone in her late 20s to being someone in her early 30s.

of course for me that dread wasn't really there. in fact I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I can now finally stop saying I'm nearly 30 and just start saying I'm 30, even if I wouldn't technically be 30 for another 15 hours.

my last act as a 29-year-old? exhaling a lung full of smoke and stubbing out the last cigarette I'll ever smoke. I'm not much of a smoker–less than a pack a year–but if I want people to keep being surprised by how old I am, I should probably give it up for good. the romantic I am, I wouldn't be satisfied with simply stopping one day–I need quitting to be slightly dramatic, to have a sense of finality. I bought an entire pack of smokes just to smoke one more before I quit.

I may not dread 30, but a lot of people do. I think it's a combination of media messaging, and a tendency for people to have friends their own age.

television producers love to make shows about high schoolers, even when–with all the sex and drugs in them–they clearly want to be making shows about university students. I think every coming-of-age show and movie being about teenagers contributes to young people feeling like if they're not making life-long friends and having dramatic adventures in their teens that they're wasting the best years of their lives.

I'd address teenagers here to tell them hey, don't worry about it; but I know who reads my blog and I know that you know that your best years don't start until after you leave high school.

I'm privileged to have friends of all ages, and my friends in their 30s and 40s+ are doing just fine; and they all agree that 30 is where things really start to kick off.

it was around 25, 26 when I started to realise it was less important whether other people liked me and more important whether I liked me. I felt like a late bloomer for figuring it out then, but I think I might have been ahead of the curve. I'm told 30 is when you stop giving a shit; but maybe there are levels of not giving a shit that my 29-year-old self was unable to even conceive of.

when I look at the world around me, I see a lot of people who have forgotten what it's like to be young. cynically, I think a lot of people turn 18 and then just stay that way even as they get older. less cynically, maybe their personal growth has become invisible to them and they project their current attitudes backwards, envisioning themselves as always having had their current feelings and perspectives.

I've spent my whole life telling myself I'd never become one of those old folks who forget what being a young person feels like. and I've spent just as long wondering if they all told themselves the same thing and forgot anyway.

being young–especially being in your teens and 20s–is confusing and chaotic and it feels like everything is coming at you a million miles a minute. we romanticise the hell out of these early periods, which makes those dramatic moments seem kind of funny when you look at pictures from back then and see how underdone we all looked.

but don't get me wrong: 30 is still young. if one day I ever decide to write down my life story, today is where it begins–only occasionally looking back into my twenties, teens, and zeroes to add context.

my yiayia was in her late 60s when she died, and I didn't appreciate at the time just how young that was. though when I hear stories from her life, I'm not sure she ever got the opportunity to be young.

I have the privilege of getting to be this old while not being so paralysed with dread about aging that I don't appreciate how young I still am. I spent my teens and early 20s feeling like my youth was slipping away from me, and I think I've had my fill of that. assuming nothing dramatic happens, I've got many youthful years ahead of me, without (as much of) the weight of the imagined judgements and expectations of others.

your 20s are a weird time. so much happens in them that every year of your 20s feels like every previous year of your 20s added together, like a Fibonacci sequence of life experience. you can sometimes find yourself saying (or trying to avoid saying) "when I was your age..." to someone only 3 years younger than you. generation z are allegedly weird about age gap relationships, and while I'm skeptical of broad claims about young people, I'll admit as a zillennial that the exponential pace of my 20s had me worrying a little bit too much about very normal age gaps.

when I was in my mid-late 20s I lived in this huge awful house with 10 bedrooms, and most of the other people who lived there were in their early 20s. I was in this strange position where I wasn't close enough in age to them for us to be exactly peers, but I wasn't older enough that it wouldn't feel weird to have a mentor-peer relationship. turning 30 I feel more comfortable with the idea of being the kind of mentor figure that I needed when I was younger.

I'm still uncomfortable giving advice. I don't like telling people what to do, especially when I don't live their life so I don't know what they need. I understand now why old people tell a lot of stories.

when I'm telling someone a story, I'm not telling them about them; I'm telling them about me. I can say: here's this situation I was in, here's how I thought about it, and here's what I did; and it's up to the person I'm talking to to decide for themself whether it's relevant to their life. I know my life has been changed far more by hearing other people's stories than it has ever been changed by direct advice.

it is important to me, to be able to help people the way I needed when I was where they are.

something I heard a lot growing up was "it gets better". and while I have my ups and downs, I have to agree: it does get better. but when you've never experienced it, it's hard to even imagine. until a few years ago, the best I could imagine for my life was just getting by, keeping my head above water. it wasn't until I had a protracted period of not just feeling okay, but feeling good, that I realised I'd had no idea how good things could actually be. and now I ask myself how I assure anybody else that things get better, when I know how meaningless and abstract the idea was when I needed to believe it most.

another cliché is "you shouldn't care what other people think". when you're a kid, your world is small; so people's judgements of you take up a lot of relative space. if you're anything like me, you'll be in your 20s before you start to realise how little they matter. if you're anything like a dear friend of mine, you moved around a lot and knew whatever people thought of you, you'd be at a different school soon anyway, so why not do what you want?

the biggest cliché is the shortest, and the most important: "be yourself". be myself? who else would I be? it takes a long time–more for some than others–to figure out who "yourself" even is; especially when you're inundated with messaging about who you're allowed to be, who you're not allowed to be, and who you're expected to be. the kind of person I am now, I couldn't have imagined when I was a kid–it's hard to be something you don't know exists.

unfortunately the best answer I have for that right now is another cliché, one I intend never to use again after this: "you'll understand when you're older". sometimes to get it, you have to live it.

I've got friends now that I've known for a long time, and I've gotten to watch as they have become more and more themselves. they're more self-assured, they know who they are and what they want–and they know what they won't put up with.

that's the final bit of advice I have for younger people–girls especially, but not exclusively: there are people who want to make you feel like your desireability peaks young: they're lying. they'll tell you you've gotta get into a relationship (usually with them) before it's too late; when you're in a relationship, they'll try to make you put up with their bullshit, telling you nobody else will ever want you.

it's never too late to change path; whether that's leaving a relationship, or changing career, or picking a new name, or changing your sex. you might feel like it's too late, or like you've made so many mistakes you can't salvage what's left of your life. but as far as we can prove, you only get one life; and to employ another cliché: you gotta make the most of it.

I've been looking forward to 30.

for the past 10 years I've thought about myself in terms of early 20s, early-mid 20s, mid 20s, mid-late 20s, late 20s. but being on the tail end of 29 somehow feels like something different entirely–"nearly 30"–and it's nice to just be able to say "I'm 30".

a joke in my standup routine revolves around the idea that as I've gotten closer to 30, my brain has not updated my concept of what old is; that at age 28 I would look at a 30-year-old and go "ooh, an older woman". I'm excited to make that joke from the other end. though I worry sometimes I've joked about this so much that people think I actually consider 30 to be old.

I think the biggest thing I'm looking forward to isn't inherent to turning 30, it just happens to be happening when I'm 30: I'll be getting surgery* to fix one of god's little (actually slightly above-average) mistakes. it took me a long time to accept that it was something I needed, but I think as I've gotten older I've lost some of the flexibility I needed to keep doing mental gymnastics–but I'll tell you more about that some other time.

the hardest part of writing anything–a story, a song, a blog post–is figuring out how to end it. but as I write this, I'm not worried about endings:

I'm about to turn 30–and that's only just the beginning.

*if you'd like to help me get the best birthday gift of my life, you can contribute to my bottom surgery fund here. every little bit helps and goes appreciated more than words could ever say.