Thirty.
In a few short hours, it will be my thirtieth birthday. I welcome this rolling over of the odometer of my chronology, welcome leaving my twenties behind. Never before have I felt so solid and certain of myself. Never before have I felt stronger, more aware, or even more beautiful.
I had a lot of crazy adventures in my twenties: cementing my connection to my bestie (we met when I had just turned 18, but really got close a few months before I turned 20), moving cross-country twice, starting and graduating from university, starting graduate school, getting married (& ending that relationship as well), lots of back and forth across the Mexican border engaging in shady business, a backpacking ramble through the towns and jungles of Costa Rica, lots of drinking and carousing through quaint Southern nights, lots of wide-eyed psychonautic voyaging in the bass-thumping back lots of L.A., lots of boys and sighs and arguments and heartbreaking…writing and editing and falling off of porches and out of trees and into laps and in and out of love.
I changed my mind back and forth about what I wanted to capital-D Do with my life, career-wise, about half a dozen times (and I’m still changing it). I had three long-term relationships ranging from 2-3 years, each dying from a lack of respect. In between, I had one 9-month-long romance which marked the only time I really got my heart broken (and looking back, I’m glad that I did, because it has to happen to everyone once, and I kind of deserved it). I learned how to interact with people more easily than I had been able to all through my childhood and teens, and how to overcome shyness, and fake my way through feeling awkward. I got into the service industry at 21, and learned how to tell what people want just by looking at them. I went through periods of bleak misanthropy and bright hope. I figured out that I shouldn’t drink as much as my peers, and certainly not as much as I had been drinking, because it tends to make me volatile and amplify my emotions. I went through a creative dry spell where I had little desire to write or draw or sing or paint, and could barely read fiction because my imagination was asleep.
I hit a transition point somewhere about halfway through 28. Things started to change rapidly, and about a year ago, right around the time I was turning 29, my imagination woke up again. The creative force within me grew insatiable, sprouting new ideas and demanding to be fed paint and paper and driving songs. And as the dust of my ending marriage cleared, I realized that going through the whole process had made me stronger and made me able to see more clearly. Standing up for myself made me see myself more clearly, made me see what I was fighting for and why I was leaving.
The end of my marriage taught me a big lesson. For most of my twenties, I had grown used to throwing my love, fistful after fistful, into an abyss. Many men are black holes of love…you toss it to them and they eat it greedily but reflect nothing back. I wanted so badly to give love and to be loved that I settled for a subpar situation: someone who didn’t respect me, who didn’t really see me. I believed in that whole fairytale lie and thought that if he loved me enough to marry me, then he must love me enough. But it wasn’t enough. In the process of my marriage ending, I decided that never again was I going to throw away love on someone who didn’t return it in kind to me. This Fiona Apple lyric, from “Oh Well” summed up my last relationship to a tee:
When I was looking with calm affection/you were searching out my imperfections
Actually, that whole song describes that whole relationship. Well, I finally learned my lesson about wasting my love. It was almost involuntary. I reached a breaking point, and my love flipped off, just like a switch. And I suddenly just didn’t care anymore. It was only a little sad, and the sadness was more borne of disappointment and knowing that I was going to have to deal with something difficult than sadness that things were ending. I didn’t hurt. I didn’t hope for things to change. I just took a cold, hard look at myself and my circumstances, picked up my things, and moved along.
I also learned something from grad school, but not what I was “supposed” to be learning there. I learned what my priorities are. I learned some more things about what I don’t want. I learned that I can do almost anything, but if I try to do too much, I lose a grip on all of it. I learned that I can get into a top-ten Ph.D. program, and do well, which I always would have wondered about if I hadn’t tried it. I learned where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I learned that there is an effective upper bound to my intelligence, but it can be stretched and extended with focus and determination. I learned that I don’t really want to be a professor. I learned that I want to be free of that place.
And lately, lately I have been learning about real love. When I was 28, and smack in the middle of hitting this strange transition stride, I met Dave. I wrote all about that first year in a post this past July, but the time since then has been incredible. One might think that sharing a tiny bedroom-sized apartment with (as Danielle puts it) an airplane bathroom and a ship-kitchen would be a recipe for killing the romance, but we’ve just gotten closer (figuratively) as we’ve gotten closer (literally).
We spend our post-work nights and days off playing video games together, watching movies on the computer together, or doing our own things individually mere feet apart, but there is always a small, spiderwebby connection between the two of us where one’s actions jangle the web and cause the other’s attention to shift focus. I laugh while reading a book he’s read, and he wants to know which funny part I just got to. He snickers at an online video, and starts it over for me to watch as I curl up to see. I bring a spoonful of gravy from the kitchen for him to try. He reaches out in sleep, smiling, and cups my calf while I clean a paintbrush. Our waking lives are an intertwined mesh of the same 8 or 9 activities, looped in a repeating pattern, crossing paths, weaving away. And then, of course, there is the luxurious, decadent shared sleep.
Giving love to him is not throwing it into an abyss. It is more like sprinkling water onto a lush garden, where what I put in returns to me with accelerated growth and burgeoning beauty. In this fertile, green environment, I’ve relearned how to trust, and how to be worthy of trust. I’ve stared down the inner beasts that letting someone get this close to me has occasionally awakened, and come out on the other side of it a saner, calmer, and more reasonable person. Knowing him has encouraged me to be a better person, not because he looks at my flaws and tells me what’s wrong with me (he is the least critical-of-me person I’ve ever dated), but because his lack of trying to change and control me leaves space for me to figure out what kinds of good I’d ideally want to be and strive toward those personal development goals of my own. It is good.
All of these things that I’ve learned in the winding-down years of my twenties, coupled with all the learning I did while adventuring and from making mistakes in my early- and mid-twenties has set me up for a fourth decade of my life that is looking like it is going to be pretty flippin’ sweet. A lot of people I know, my peers, are or have been sad about their twenties ending, like they think their best years are somehow behind them just because their age has a new number at the front of it. Not me. I am wishing my twenties less of a wistful farewell and more of a joyous good riddance. I am better than I have ever been, and things are constantly improving for me.
Barring some sort of freak disaster, I’m guessing that the next thirty years of my life are going to be markedly better than the first thirty were. I’m about done with my schooling, and ready to find a way to make some money. I’m hopefully done with disastrous dating, and ready to make some love. I’m forging a new relationship with my family, on my own terms. I’ve made friends with myself. I’m on a constant upward spiral, revisiting concepts and ideas and reforming them to be stronger and more sound. I’m happy, and getting happier all the time.
Hello thirty, pleased to meet you!
