On Turning Thirty

I thought I’d have more to say about turning the big 30 but, at least so far, I haven’t had any epiphanies or strong rushes of emotions to mark this great event. I am thankful to be inaugurating a new decade in my life today, but I have to admit I feel much the same as I did yesterday when I was still 29. And yet, in a subtle way, I suppose this particular birthday does mark a change in my life. I am no longer a girl in my twenties; I am now officially a thirty year old woman. Of course, it’s hard to take this new label seriously in a country where thirty and even forty year olds regularly live with their parents under the guise that “housing is just to expensive” (which by the way, translates to “If I can’t buy a very large flat with all the amenities, I’d rather stay at home where my mom does all the cooking and cleaning and no one asks my sorry ass for a dime”), but let’s pick this thing apart anyway, for argument’s sake.

Since I have no way of knowing what awaits me in my thirties, the best way of going about this is to recap some of the highlights of my twenties. I graduated from college at 21, moved to Madrid at 22, finished my masters at 24, got Spanish working papers and started to function as a legal resident alien at 26, held several crazy jobs from 25 to 28, started my current crazy job at 28, where I met my husband and married him at 29. Phew. All those milestones may fit rather succinctly into one albeit ridiculously long sentence, but when I think about how much my life has changed from my 20^th birthday celebration in the KC coffee house until now, it’s impossible to ignore the changes that have come with every passing year. It just happens so slowly that we don’t always realize what’s taking place until birthdays come and force us to pause for long enough to notice and evaluate these life events.

So while I technically still feel like the same person I was when I was twenty, I’m pretty sure that if I met myself at twenty right now, thirty year old me would probably beg to differ. I don’t mean that I’ve lost myself along the way or anything like that; I just mean that I have evolved as a person, which is pretty much the way things should be. Of course not everything has changed, which is comforting. While I now eat all sorts of things I never would’ve even looked at in college, I still love a good tube of raw cookie dough. Thankfully, in spite of the ocean that separates us, I’m still close with many of the friends I had in my early twenties, and I feel confident we will be close until way into our hundreds.

I’m still me, just a more evolved, mature and experienced version. I’m pretty sure twenty year old me would think I was way cool and want to be me at thirty, so I can’t complain. What more could a girl, I mean woman, ask for?