Thirty

I woke up one day and I was thirty. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Twenty nine was harsh; I tried to feel good about it, but I could not shake the feeling that I was approaching a very important deadline that I was unprepared to meet. When I turned twenty, I had an idea of what I wanted my life to look like by the time I turned thirty. Do the ideal and the reality line up? Not at all. I have the family I always wanted, though I’m not very good at managing it, and often feel like the world’s finest screw-up in the areas of “wife” and “mother.” I have the cute little house and the nice car and the freedom to indulge in a few extravagances like impractical shoes and hardcover books, but I didn’t earn any of these things myself and I often feel like a freeloader, and still ask permission for every little dollar I spend. I have a job, but it’s not the job I had in mind after I went through all kinds of crap to earn my degree. I’m physically healthier than I was so many years ago when I was battling anorexia, but I find that new stresses have made me start to revert to old habits, and I’m struggling to keep myself from sliding so far downhill so fast that I won’t be able to get a hold on myself. Some days I feel old, some days I feel like a child, some days I don’t know who the hell I am and I just want to stay in bed and sleep.

So there it is: I’m not happy with the way my life has turned out so far. But there is a positive side here. I woke up one day and I was thirty, and it feels good to be thirty. Well, it feels more good than not good to be thirty. Part of me is lamenting the way I’ve wasted years doing not much of anything (though I did have a couple of babies, which is no small thing), but part of me is happy that I have the insight to do something more with my next ten years. I have the desire, now I just need to work on the logistics. It seems that I have quite a mess here, and I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve been doing all I know how to do, which is to start small, to start with one thing and go from there. Right now I’m focusing on my writing, since it seems to be the easiest thing for me these days. There are other facets of my life that need retooling, but anytime I attempt to make those changes, fear makes me back off. So I’ll start with something I feel I can handle, and maybe, at some point, I can begin to approach those larger, scarier aspects of my unhappiness.

I have to admit, though I am allowing myself to feel excited for the future, I’m more terrified than anything. I think about all the possibilities and I feel overwhelmed. That’s the problem with complacency; it becomes comfortable and safe and the temptation to stay in that state is so strong that you can begin to tell yourself things that aren’t true and don’t make any sense. You mutter things like, I’ll never be able to do this. I’m just going to make things worse for everybody. There is no reason I can’t just continue living life this way; it’s not like it’s killing me or anything. You push your feelings away and convince yourself that everything is just fine and the next thing you know, you wake up and you’re thirty. Or forty, or fifty. As tempting as complacency is, I know I can’t stay there. I know that’s not who I am, not who I was ever meant to be. So as much as it hurts, as much as it terrifies me, I have to do something. One thing I know for certain is that, no matter what happens, I will ultimately be okay. I’ve been through some real hell in my life, but somehow I have always, always, gotten back to okay. I’m going to have to just trust that certainty, shut my eyes, and jump in, and hope to hell I find my way back out again.