Thirty.
I thought I would have something terribly profound to say about it.
Some neat little conclusion about the person I became, the things I learnt, the mistakes I made, and all the ways twenty-year-old me would look at thirty-year-old me and think we had finally figured it out.
We have not.
Thank fuck.
Thirty years of being alive have taught me that life is considerably less interested in narrative structure than I am. Some years were beautiful. Others were held together with caffeine, books, stubbornness and the conviction that surely this particular disaster would eventually become funny. There were moments when everything felt possible and others when simply continuing felt like work.
And yet, I am fucking alive. I am here.
Still too intense. Still too curious. Still reading too many books and listening to music too loudly. Still writing stories because apparently one imaginary world occupying my brain at a time would be far too reasonable. Still making things. Still caring with my entire chest. Still laughing at inappropriate moments. Still occasionally looking at my own life and thinking, well, this is a spectacular amount of plot for one person.
For a long time, I believed growing up meant becoming more acceptable. Less strange. Less much. Easier to understand, easier to fit somewhere, easier to love.
One of the loveliest things my late twenties gave me was people who made me realise I had misunderstood the assignment.
Some friendships arrived later than I thought the important ones were supposed to. They quietly dismantled the idea that love has an expiry date, that your people must have known you since childhood to know you properly, or that belonging is something you either find young or somehow miss altogether.
They met me as I was. And, wonderfully, terribly, inconveniently, they seemed to like her.
The nerd. The writer. The woman who will talk far too much about a book, a song, a story or some obscure thing she discovered three hours ago. The one who disappears into her own head. The one who feels everything too much and sometimes says fuck considerably more than necessary. The one still learning when to stay, when to leave, when to speak, when to stop apologising.
They taught me that friendship can feel less like being tolerated and more like being recognised. That I don’t have to sand myself down before entering a room. That there are people with whom being myself is not something I have to earn.
I wish I could tell the younger versions of me that.
I wish I could reach backwards through all thirty years — through every version who thought she was behind, difficult, too strange, too loud inside her own head, not enough of one thing and too much of another — and tell her that none of this happens according to schedule.
Some things come late. Some people come late. Sometimes you come late to yourself.
So I don’t want thirty to be a funeral for my twenties or a deadline for becoming someone else. I don’t particularly want to enter this decade wiser, calmer, polished or complete.
I would quite like to enter it as myself.
A little battered. Very loved. Still curious. Still creating. Still becoming.
Thirty years happened to me. Some were wonderful. Some were absolute shit. All of them got me here.
And against an occasionally impressive amount of nonsense, I am still fucking alive.
That feels worth celebrating.
Hello, thirty.
You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting into.