I’m Turning 30, but I Was Older When I Was 13
unpacking the decade-crisis demons ☼ philosophizing age and growing "old" ☼ intentions for my thirties
My birthday is next week. To me, birthdays are another way of crafting our life stories, annual milestones that lend us the opportunity to gaze inwards. Ever since I stumbled into adulthood (moved to a city, got a job, came out), I started the tradition of spending my birthday doing things I love alone: eating at my favorite cafés, walking along my favorite streets, writing and witnessing the world fizz by. While I typically organize a dinner in the evening and a gathering over the weekend, the day itself is set aside for me, and me only, which is something we often forget to indulge in amidst the speed of everyday life. With my own company, I like to think about the past year, wonder about the next, and make promises to myself. Promises that center around being, as opposed to attaining: Be kinder, be curious. Be more of yourself.
However, this birthday feels a bit different. Over the past few weeks, an aversion towards my new age appeared like a tsunami in the desert: I am turning 30. Although I have never been one to over-identify with a number, leaving one decade for another has transpired a cocktail of discomfort in my gut, a mixture of doubts whose emotions feel familiar, yet whose acoustics only rung clear as of recent: Where am I going? What am I doing? Is this enough? I have carried these questions throughout my life like cryptic stones in a bag, stones I thought I had to carry until I discovered their meaning, only attempting to readjust their weight when not doing so risked falling apart.
But here is another question: What if I drop the stones altogether? What if I take them out of the bag and decrypt them for good, let them summon whatever great insecurity lurks in the deep beyond and look the monster straight in the eye. In doing so, the stones might polish into crystal, the questions might refine into reflections: on fear, on hope, on self.
When I first sat down to plan my thirtieth birthday, one part of me wanted to organize something grand while another wanted to disappear. I felt unprepared to awaken in the age that so many of us grew up equating with adulthood, a figurative dimension in which our life’s biggest dreams should have already materialized, because no one wants to be a late bloomer. When older, no one wants to ask themselves the question their younger self would have asked, if granted the power of time travel:
Am I who I thought I would be?
When we are in our twenties, we think about growing old as a foreign place. We imagine that when we get there—our thirties, forties or fifties—everything will be different. The popular perception is that everything will be worse. It will be too late to want certain things, let alone pursue them. We think that our happiness and humanity will be defined by the things we did or failed to do, as if we will not be the same people still trying to do certain things and failing at others. So we make promises to ourselves: I will do this before I am thirty, I will have this before I am forty, as if ticking off boxes before a certain age insures us against life’s biggest threat: whether or not we will amount to enough. (Spoiler alert: we are enough.)
The thing is, when we get to that place—the “old” that is relative to however old we are now—we tend to feel the same. If not the same physically, then mentally. If not the same mentally, then spiritually. The same being: We are changing. We are growing. We are making mistakes and learning from them. We are excited, hopeful, delusional and bored. We are becoming better people, better at being better to ourselves. Better at realizing that we are already better enough.
Perhaps we never feel old the way we expect to because age is, at its core, a construct of time. A construct within a construct. In categorizing our lives into years and those years into decades, we limit ourselves to a linear story. We think: at 30 I am this, at 50 I will be this, at 70 I will be this, when, in fact, living is a quiet chaos of becoming, nonlinear in its nature. We are never 30 or 50 or 70. We are thirty and five minutes and fifty three seconds. We are fifty and a few weeks. We are seventy and seven months and three days. Our selves and ways of being in the world are born again, and again, and again. In finishing this paragraph, you are different than you were at the beginning.
So if we are always changing, always aging, then what is “old”? Old is relevant. One one hand, sixty is old compared to forty. Forty is old compared to thirty. On the other hand, the selves of our past—us when we were nine, nineteen or twenty nine—are old, too. Perhaps the earliest (youngest) versions of ourselves are actually the “oldest.” They are, after all, the oldest models, the least renewed, the least reinvented. Perhaps as we grow older in age we attain a kind of youth that depends upon our ability to live outside of time’s rigid frames: outside of desires, deadlines and did or did not’s.
At any given moment, we are a culmination of our selves from the past and our selves from the future, the common denominator being our selves now, here, in the present. The present is all that matters.
As I ask myself the grand question: Am I who I thought I would be? The only answer that comes to mind is: I am who I want to be.
Ten years ago, when I turned twenty, I sat down to envision everything I aspired towards over the decade to follow. Revisiting that document, there are many aspirations I did not reach, many that make me laugh and cringe: collaborate with Beyoncé (never got to thank her), win nobel prize (what?), become a published author (still love that for us). My first instinct was to rush to finish everything I thought I would have finished by now, as if life were a test that we could cram for the night before, realizing, too late, that we had spent too much time enjoying ourselves than studying for what mattered. So I started writing Beyoncé an email—until I remembered that I did not have her email address.
Of course, what matters is that we enjoyed ourselves. That we decided we deserved joy, allowed ourselves to embody it, instead of waiting for someone else’s permission—the most conservative administrator most often being ourselves.
I suppose, if there is any intention I have for this new decade of my life, it is to give myself the permission to claim it as my own. The permission to wake up and feel: this is my life that I am living, a life filled with so much magic and whimsy that it is mine and mine only—our lives are only ours to live. The permission to be the hope and awe that I have spent the past decade searching for, even if I was lucky to find it in many of the people and places I learned to call home.
Looking back on these past ten years, I am proud—of myself, my friends and my family. Of all of us. I am amazed at what we are capable of when we befriend our intuition, when we swap fear for trust.
My twenties were laced with an urgency to live, as if life was a sport that I could become the best at. I was obsessed with finding meaning and joy as if it was the center of a cinnamon roll, so as to sink my teeth into its flesh and share the sweetness with everyone else. I moved abroad three times, said yes to everything and dove into risk without a second thought. While my approach was a bit demanding, eager to the point of impatience, there was some magic in believing that there was a difference between living and living.
The only issue with the gusto of my earlier years is that it grew from a misinformed idea: that I needed to live before I got old, that the time would eventually run out. The funny thing is that time is always running, that is how we designed it. If we try to chase after it, we will always feel behind.
I realize, now, that there is no behind. In fact, there is rarely ever a need to run. If we stop running, we might see the only thing that matters, the thing that never changes, no matter what decade we’re in: We are here. We get one chance to be here, to know what it is like to be here, to know what it is like to be us, and to share all of its tastes and colors with the people who make here into home.
This is my chance, this is your chance, this is our chance. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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