My Year of 30, an Update

Wow! I just realized it’s been a whole year since I posted to the blog. A whole-freakin’-year. I thought surely I had posted something. I’ve sure got enough blog post drafts sitting in my Evernote right now. Somehow, though, they never got finished. Which is the story of most of my year 30. Most of the stuff that I had planned didn’t get done, or was pushed aside for something more convenient or more readily tangible.

It was a hard year that made me wish for the earlier, better years a lot. You know those years in your 20s that you seem to just breeze through. Where you seem to make all the right choices and magical things happened to you: like getting married, and then getting pregnant (in the order you planned to). Those magical years that you look back on and think, man that was awesome…I wish it could happen again.

But they will never happen again. At least not just like they did. You will have better years again, or at least I hope that I will. Which brings me back to my year 30. So, truth time.

Here’s mine: 30 sucked. It sucked way harder than I expected it to. Maybe it’s because I tried to shrug it off like it didn’t mean anything. I remember thinking, as I watched my best friend struggle with turning the big 3-0 that it wasn’t going to affect me like that. That 30 was only a number. It didn’t mean anything. That it was just another step in the path. A path that I was completely in control of.

Boy, was I wrong. Because the truth is that paths have bumps, they have holes, and they certainly never run in a straight line. Because the real truth is that it wasn’t the number that mattered. It was the fact that I saw it as a milestone (even if I was in denial) and that meant something. So, it affected me. And that’s a truth that doesn’t paralyze me with fear. It just makes me want to kick this next year straight in the teeth so that I don’t feel like this again.

So, here’s to a better year than the last one. To less talking and more doing. To less listening to my inner critic. To less perfect, and more shipping. And to not worrying so much, which seems to be a lesson I need to learn over and over again. And if it doesn’t turn out that way, well, it’s life. It’s messy, and chaotic, and terrible, and funny, and enlightening, and beautifully unexpected.