I can’t have been the only child who thought about 30 year olds and imagined ‘real’ adults, with grown up jobs, homeowners (probably) and basically people who had their sh*t together all of the time. 30 seemed like a million years away and in the journey from child to thirty I thought that all of life’s goals and dreams will be achieved or at least on the way. Are we all just twenty somethings who had age 30 creep up on them and realised children consider us ‘real adults’?
Your early twenties are just an extension of your teens really as you slowly creep towards calling yourself an adult, mid twenties for me were much the same as I made goals that I would like to acheive before I am 30.
I am 30 today, and I haven’t achieved those goals, but that’s ok. In recent years I have had some really difficult times, and although it’s been really hard to see that anything will get easier, I have gained perspective. Although it would be a really lovely acheivement to have found the job I want to stay in, to have lots of savings and be a homeowner by 30, it really doesn’t matter. Not in the grand scheme of things, it’s cliché but the things we should be grateful for are our health, our children if we are lucky enough to have them, and things like still having both parents around. I lost my dad suddenly less than 2 weeks before my 29th birthday so am definitely grateful to still have my mum around.
I will likely still make goals and aim to achieve them by certain points in my life, mostly because that’s the sort of person I am, I have lists for everything and am forever making plans and targets – and that’s fine. But the difference is that instead of feeling as though I have failed, I will accept that we cannot plot and plan our whole lives and some of our best achievements are along paths we may not have intended to take.
So here’s to being thirty, the age I thought was a real grown up, we are all winging it an probably still asking our Mum and Dad for advice on how to adult.
The Scenic Route to Sanity 