Sunday, March 9, 2014

thirty is the new 20. or something like that.

People keep asking me what 30 feels like, and I keep responding with “Just like 29.”

And, I’m, not even trying to be funny; really, it’s not as if on the 18th of February, everything for me changed. I woke up and felt the way I felt the day before.

I’ve felt “30” (or, how ever I think 30 is and was supposed to feel) a while ago, actually. It was the moment I woke up and realized I was comfortable in my own skin, which is something I can say I never felt in the first 28 years of my life. When I realized how blessed I truly have been and truly am and stopped focusing on everything that was or could or might go wrong, everything changed.

Being an adult is sort of a funny thing, especially when you don’t realize that it’s happening. And, when you become an adult, you realize it has little to do with age and more to do with experience. I still wake up and wonder when it happened: when I started to enjoy going to bed at 9pm instead of staying up until midnight; when I started to prefer a night in with a glass/bottle of wine than go out to a loud bar or lounge or restaurant; When I started to enjoy balancing my checkbook and filing my paperwork and organizing my drawers and creating a schedule; when I started to love doing laundry and writing thank you cards and buying crap from Home Goods. I mean, seriously, who am I?

But honestly, for me, being an adult has become less about the things I do and the time I go to bed. It’s really about the person I have become. Well, first, just KNOWING who I am and not spending all of my life feeling lost and sad and insecure; just being comfortable with who I am and where I am. Being an adult, to me, is feeling productive and responsible with my time and my choices. Being an adult is realizing that I don’t have to spend time with any one who doesn’t make me feel good about myself, who doesn’t care about me, or who makes me feel anything less than like a good person. Being an adult is also knowing that if it means I only have a couple good friends, I’m still better off.


This place in my life is way more exciting than my 20s ever were and not because nothing exciting happened in my 20s, but because I’m in a place in my life where I can understand the exciting things and enjoy them and LIVE. I’m living and not just trying to get by or get through. I’m enjoying being with my friends, hanging out with my parents and being able to have that kind of relationship with them, watching my friends have babies and get married. I’m enjoying being in a relationship with a man who works hard, opens doors for me, doesn’t judge my craziness, and who doesn’t ever make me question how he feels or what he wants. I’m enjoying working at a job that I’m good at, that I enjoy, that I feel productive at. Mostly, I’m enjoying where I’m at and looking forward to the next decade of my life and what it will bring.

No comments:

Post a Comment