Thirty Schmirty…

I really don’t feel good about the hitting ‘30’ thing.

I’m still six months or so away, but can already feel a sense of trepidation about suddenly finding myself in my thirties. Because then, I will have to accept that I’ve ceased to be a ‘young woman’ and will instead have become merely ‘a woman’. Not a mademoiselle, a madame. Not a Fräulein, but a frau. Not a joven, a mujer. Not a 年轻女子 a 女子 (You get the picture)…

Anyway I don’t think I’m being optimistic when I say I don’t look particularly old for my age. Then again I don’t look particularly young either. In fact it’s fair to say I probably look my actual age… and I can live with that.

Mentally however, it feels to an extent as though the first thirty years of my life have been spent struggling to get to grips with myself. To understand, accept and appreciate not only myself, but the culture within which I live and the society into which I have to integrate.

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t imagine living beyond thirty. To be perfectly honest I always had a weird feeling that I wouldn’t reach thirty. Not trying to be overly weird or morbid, but I do have a vivid imagination and so it’s peculiar that whilst I have always been able to daydream about the most elaborately detailed fantasies; I have never been able to visualize myself in my thirties… Anyway before I freak myself out thinking about that too much (I DON’T WANNA DIIIIEEEEEE!) here’s hoping that it was nothing more than a silly teenage eccentricity.

There are positives, of course, to be taken from reaching this milestone. It seems to me that as you get older you care less about how others perceive you, and more about extracting what you want out of life. After all life isn’t a popularity contest. It’s unimportant whether you’re deemed ‘hot’ or ’not’, whether your trainers are quite as cool as they could be, if you venture out to the local shops without make-up on at the risk of being seen by someone you know, and don’t particularly like.

All that stuff… the trivial, petty things people worry themselves over are so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, that they don’t deserve a second of our time fretting about. This is something I’ve come to realise as I’ve grown up. It might seem like common sense to some, but as someone who spent a large part of their young adult life caged, almost restricted, by their own insecurities and social awkwardness. I find it overwhelmingly liberating to have learned the fact, that life’s more fun when you don’t give a fuck.
Perhaps it takes accumulating the life experience (and some of the knocks, losses and low periods we will all encounter) en route to reaching this age. Maybe without the benefit of hindsight it’s not so easy to put things into this simpler perspective. It makes sense. I suppose if I’m honest, it’s not so much the fact that I’m getting older that I resent, but more that I’ve wasted so much of my life in doing so. But as I keep telling myself… thirty really isn’t that old.

So there you go. If I’ve taught you nothing else from this shamefully irregular blog, my beautiful/handsome loyal reader, it’s that you should stop worrying about whether or not you have soiled toilet-paper stuck to your heel, if you’re going bald at the sides, or if you ‘measure up’ as it were. No no no; Nuclear Armageddon! Aeroplanes nose-diving! Asteroids decimating Mother-Earth… THAT’S what you should be concerned about.

Lucy.

~ by LucyJWatson on November 7, 2010.