The Mid-Thirties

I have 20 minutes before my therapy appointment, which happened to be scheduled on my birthday, which just so happens to be today.

How fitting for a therapy appointment! Ha. 

Yep, today is my birthday. I’m 34. Yay, mid-thirties! I think? I posed this question on Threads a few days ago and received mixed responses: What year is the start of your mid-thirties? Is it 34 or 35? 50% of folks said 34. The other 50% either said 35, 39, or 50. While these responses elicited quite the much-needed cackle, I’m still unsure whether this is officially the start of my mid-thirties. 

I don’t feel very mid-thirty-ish. I look in the mirror and often see a little girl or teenager. Part of this is because I was not blessed with the height gene or the gene that gives you a pronounced “womanly” body. The other part is that I still feel like a small child. A teenager at best. Certainly not an adult and certainly not an adult in their mid-thirties. An adult in her mid-thirties is sure of herself — confident in who she is, what she wants, and where she is going. An adult in her mid-thirties is sexy and effortlessly beautiful because she radiates assuredness from within. 

I am none of these things. Confident? Ha! Self-assure? Nerp. Know what I want and where I am going? Not really. I’m just out here. Surviving. Feeling every bit as confused about myself and my life as I did ten years ago. The questions I had then were different: Is this man I’m dating “The One?” (He was.) Will I ever get married? (We did.) Will I get to have children? Is my desire for daughters selfish? What kind of mother will I be? (We have two beautiful daughters and I’m still figuring out what kind of mother I am 7 years later.) I thought for sure once those questions were answered, confidence and assuredness would arrive. But, alas, it did not. It was merely replaced with new questions, more confusion, and even less assuredness than the none I had before. I didn’t know that was possible. 

So, I’ve somehow arrived here. I blinked. It’s 10 years later. I’ve reached the age that I used to tell myself would be the magical age when everything would finally feel aligned. I’m here. And, so very little feels aligned. So very little feels aligned, and I’m still a short, unconfident, girl-woman trying to fumble her way through life. But, none of this is bad. This sounds terribly negative, but it’s not. It’s surprisingly and wonderfully beautiful. I love it here. Because I do know one thing now that I did not know at 24: you never figure it out. No matter how old you get, life gets more uncertain and confusing. Life changes before your eyes, moments you could never predict or prepare for happen and alter you forever, your body molds and shifts as it works to keep you alive, your problems shift but never cease, and through it all, you keep moving forward. That is the one constant — you will move forward. You are always moving forward. 

I find my assurance in the guaranteed forward motion of life. Time does not stand still, so we must stop waiting for it to magically do so. We all wish we could slow down time, freeze it for a bit, and squeeze more time out of the finite time we have. We waste so much time waiting for time to change even though we know it’s impossible. Imagine the amount of time we could reclaim if we stopped waiting for time! What if this is the answer that we’ve been looking for? Stop waiting for time. Stop waiting for that moment when it all makes sense. It never arrives. We must grab time by the hands and move with it, declaring that our here and now is all that matters. We must care less and live more. We must choose that our arrival has already happened, and it keeps happening every day. We’ve already arrived. We’re here. We get to be confident and sure because life will move forward no matter what. We can be confident in this moment we are living in because we know this moment is right here in front of us. No matter the confusion that surrounds us, the grief that is within us, or the frustrations of tomorrow, we can rest in knowing that right now, we are alive and this moment that we are sitting in cannot be returned to us, so we must seize it. 

I was going to write 34 lessons for turning 34, but I think every lesson can be summarized into one: life is happening now. Grab a hold of it and don’t let go. Stop waiting for your moment to arrive and declare that this moment you are in right now, every day, is your moment. Live. Your. Life. I’m damn sure going to live mine. 

Starting now.