I used to think of someone that was thirty as someone old.
This, of course, was when I was about eight or nine years old. Why wouldn’t you, when they more than tripled my age back then? My own dad was 30 before I even turned ten, and as the years passed and I became a teenager I did think that that was the age in which you had to have your life sorted. After all you got out of University at 23, perhaps 25 if you wanted to do a master or take another degree, but surely before 26. Then four years of working in between would surely be enough time to get married and buy a nice house and have nice sparkly things in it. It is the traditional idea of a life, isn’t it? The one you grow up with in the 90s in which most women work, and a good future and a good husband are pretty much assured after you get out of university and dive right into work. You idealize those things, because that is what you’ve been taught in every show, in every movie, from Disney to the other end of pop culture.
It is freeing to unlearn all of this.
Yet then you find yourself with these things in your grasp, and you don’t find them fulfilling, and a part of you wonders if there’s anything inherently wrong with you, because you were so close to it, and yet it wasn’t for you.
Years pass and the big 3 0 approaches, and it looks like a summit to conquer. A social milestone: one that will have you looking at your life and reflecting on it, measured against the constant demands of society. All those established patterns, all those cliches you unlearned because they were not for you do still come to haunt you, especially in the current static state of things. In this stagnant moment in which all the things you had envisioned for this time have had to be parked on the side, to be revisited when the world opens its gates again and our dreams are not condemned to be just dreams.
Encountered feelings as you see the date approaching, sneaking up to you like an uninvited guest, one you wish you could also tell ‘hey, it’s a pandemic, how about we do this some other time?’ But time is inexorable, for the better or for the worse.
This uncertainty at the gates of a milestone breeds insecurity. Questions that never took this much of my time, but then again, when did we all have this much time to reflect? Questions about the purpose of one’s life, about the path to take, about to what the future would bring. It’s the Schröndiger’s paradox, in which your future is both dead at alive at the same time, but you are not yet allowed to open the box.
And you wonder what you’d find inside. Because sometimes you feel fulfilled and fine with your life as it is, sometimes you wonder if there is something else awaiting for you, and you hope there is. Sometimes you wonder if you will find a life partner, if you will ever like someone that much. It is tiring not to know who it would be, or if there’ll ever be someone. Yet then you’d maybe find someone and like they idea of them for a brief moment in time, and outline what it would be like, what it could be like, and then you unconsciously blow it up. Because perhaps you want it because you got told by those Disney movies that you should have it, because society keeps pressing you in subtle ways and you are meant to think you should be with someone. And just like that, you’ve gone full circle.
Yet, would you really like to have to dedicate any precious solitude to someone? When you love your time to be your own? Probably not, because you like your freedom too much.
Then you read that Bukowski quote that can so exquisitely torture you and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, what do you call it? Freedom, or loneliness?
It would be easy to fall into that, feeling sorry for oneself without remembering I really wouldn’t have it any other way. And that worry dissipates, sometimes lingers in the background, sometimes you forget about it for days at the time. And sure, it will come back, but you can vanquish it again.
Then there’s the question of aging, of the physical changes we will go through. All those things the beauty brands tell you are undesirable: all the wrinkles, the grey hairs, the body’s rhythms slowing down. Did you ever want children? Because surely it’s getting harder and harder for you each time should you ever change your mind! And I look at these thoughts, living without paying rent in my head because society is built on the insecurities of women. On women waking up and disliking this and that about themselves, but truly, what would they do if we all loved ourselves?
I’m going to believe, fiercely, that my thirties will be like my twenties but with money, and hopefully a lot more of wisdom. I remember my first day at uni, eighteen and bright eyed and ready to take on the world. The man that would turn out to be my favorite professor -teaching Political Psychology and forcing us to really think, and debate- saying that we had made it. That we had survived the disastrous schooling system, and that now we were about to start the best time of our lives. Ironically enough, he was the same professor that gave our Political Science graduation speech, and said that this was the best time of our lives. And I remember being the only one squinting at him, thinking that even though I understood the purpose of it was to uplift us, wasn’t it a bit depressing to think that the best time of our lives would be limited to that?
I remember thinking he truly had made me such an skeptic after all those debates, after five years nurturing critical thinking, and for a very long time I questioned it. And it is easy to believe it might well be the best time of your life when you are traveling, when you are out there, having fun. When it’s all about hedonism and decadence and tomorrow seems far away as you are held by the momentum, as if this was truly building into a spectacular climax and there was nothing for you after it.
If these is truly the best time of my life, I will never wish to leave then, never maturing. Wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing me to remain, being exotiziced into being forever young, obsessed with keeping this delicate balance of things.
But if that’s all I have in my mind, I might as well feel sorry for myself. As Toni Morrison so eloquently puts it:
I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here, your choices of companions, of the profession that you will enter. You deserve it and I want you to gain it, everybody should. But if that’s all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these are indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.
30 isn’t the pinnacle, nor 40, or 50 will be. So here’s what I tell myself:
Grow old, but don’t grow up. Keep that childish curiosity alive inside of you, and go on about the business of living without fear. The best time in your life is what you make it to be, what you want it to be, because this is your story. And your life is already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.
