Why I'm Not Nervous to Turn 30
My two cents on how to opt-out of age-fuelled existential crises.
In my short, wild life, I’ve packed in a generous dollop of crazy activities.
I’ve climbed mountains, hoisted people over my head and danced with them, jumped off cliffs and out of planes, slept on strangers' couches whose languages I did not speak, and eaten things that would give your average health inspector nightmares for weeks.
None of these were done out of any desire to “improve myself.” The alternative simply seemed horrifying.
I knew I had to get uncomfortable if I wanted to be happy.
“You gain a sense of your own strength and your own ability to endure difficulty, monotony, pain. What happens on the outside, one foot in front of the other, also happens on the inside. I love this idea of the body teaching us what the soul and the spirit and the heart need to know.”
-Cheryl Strayed
I was lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of unhappy middle-aged and older people at a young age.
As a retirement home chef and later a bartender, I spent hour upon hour interacting with people who felt they had wasted their lives and were now shuffling around, overweight and overworked, haunted by spouses they nagged and who nagged them in return.
“Not me” I always whispered to myself after interacting with one of these living ghosts. “Never.”
A friend recently asked me:
“Are you nervous to turn 30?”
As soon as she asked me this question, I beamed with self-pride. Not because I was ready to aggressively swat the question down or defend myself with some rant about how age is a societal construct.
No, I was proud because the idea of nervousness about turning 30 simply hadn’t occurred to me.
I smiled and shook my head no, knowing that I didn’t have to say anything else.
I’m writing this piece in a corner cafe in Bangkok, at the tail end of twenty months on the road studying movement. I sit here soaking in the certainty that I did not waste my twenties.
In the last nine years, ever since I took my first international trip, I’ve:
Visited 30 countries
Surfed on three continents
Climbed mountains on four
Learned to kiss, dance, and make love like I really mean it
Become a yoga teacher
Danced under streetlamps and in clubs, first badly and then gracefully
Fallen in and out of love more times than I can count
Learned what it really means to be present
Forgotten how to be present and had to learn again
Been called horrible things on public transportation by unhinged people in at least twenty languages
Learned that in every country you go to, somewhere there is a potbellied old man sitting in a flimsy chair watching the world go by
Come face-to-face with the awesome power of nature in ways that often left me bleeding
Slept in five-star hotels that I did not pay for
Paid for places to sleep so gross they don’t qualify for the star system
Tried (and failed) to explain to my concerned elderly Nepali host father why my American activated charcoal toothpaste was not going to rot my teeth even though it was verifiably black
Taken wrong buses that ended up going to the right place and right buses that took me places I should not have been
Experienced greed and anger from people with every reason to be satisfied and giving
Experienced kindness and generosity from people who had no business being so radiant, happy, and generous (looking at you, every Venezuelan and Ukranian that I’ve ever met)
Slept in more than 500 beds (rough estimation based on hotels, hostels, international lovers, etc)
Learned that I’ve been wrong about almost everything for most of my life
Become hopeful that if I keep cultivating self-awareness, I may one day be right about maybe ten percent of things
Learned to shut up and listen unless the person I’m listening to cannot also shut up and listen when it’s their turn
Finally learned to love my country with all of its flaws, simply because if I want to love myself, I must love where I come from
Spent enough hours waiting for/on buses, trains, and planes that I’ve earned an honorary Ph.D. in Being Alone With My Thoughts
Realized in all that alone time that the thing I’m currently worrying about is not the thing that’s actually going to cause me trouble
Not stopped worrying in the face of all evidence that it’s ridiculous
Been selfish, hurt people
Been selfless, helped people
Been sick in ways I don’t want to describe, but that involved many liquids that did not smell like roses
Realized from hundreds of conversations with people from unstable countries that at the end of the day, division and one-dimensional hatred have never gotten anyone anywhere productive
Not me. Never.
I repeat it like a mantra, as I sit here applying for jobs, about to re-enter my society (and hopefully fall in love, fingers crossed) on my own terms.
Experience-rich and resource-poor, I forge on, knowing that I will continue to choose discomfort and that I will not stop fighting to be happy.
I don’t think I’m much of an advice-giver anymore. But if I could distill this into one bullet point, it would be this:
Get uncomfortable as soon as you can. The rewards are many, the risks are few.